


Saltwater

by Quiddity



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: AU- Surf Shop, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Angst, Anxiety, Blood and Gore, Cuban!Lance, Depression, Hand Jobs, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M, Panic Attacks, Sexting, Skype Date, tourist!Shiro
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-08
Updated: 2017-01-29
Packaged: 2018-08-20 07:32:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 51,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8241407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quiddity/pseuds/Quiddity
Summary: Lance has a nice little life in Varadero. He runs a modestly popular surf shop with his buddy Hunk where he gets to spend all day just off the beach, smelling the salty breeze coming in off the ocean and chatting up all the cute tourists who drop by. But then there’s Shiro, an American man who, despite his scars, is way, way hotter than he seems to realize. 
	At the end of Shiro’s six week vacation, he comes into the shop and asks for Lance’s number. Lance gives him more. As they grow closer, he suspects that there may be more going on in Shiro’s life than he’s letting on.





	1. Phone Numbers

**Author's Note:**

> I've been writing little things on the side to practice sex scenes and that's what this started out as. Then yesterday's panel happened and this kind of exploded. Right now this is a stand alone, and I wanna come back and add one more chapter for sure but after that the plot just kind of drops off into "Long distance relationship Shance. Sometimes that gives them feelings."
> 
> Please enable me on this. I already have headcanons but I don't dare put my Voltron stuff on tumblr with all that craziness going on.
> 
> Short note on ages: Lance is 20/21 and Shiro is anywhere between 22/25

The surf shop and smoothie bar open up at 8am but Lance liked to fudge the numbers a little. Varadero beach was beautiful at sunrise and Lance loved nothing more than to come into the shop and leave the front doors wide open. All it took was a nice breeze to fill the shop with the crisp scent of saltwater and bright white sand. Sure, servicing surfboards, boogie boards, tubes, and all the rental forms that go with them can be boring, but Lance finds he could do it all day with the cool wind blowing in from the ocean and the gentle roar of waves echoing off the worn wood floor. 

Lance is settling onto a stool behind the front counter with a stack of inventory papers and receipts when he hears footsteps creak on the hardwood floor. It's rare that someone comes in so early so he looks up, prepared to help Hunk with whatever fruit he's brought in for the smoothie bar today. 

It's not Hunk. Instead, Shiro stands in the doorway dripping sea water onto the floor. He's dressed only in a pair of black swim trunks that cling to his hips and thighs. Lance stares as beads of water collect in Shiro's collar and slide down his chest and belly, all tanned, scarred skin and thick muscle.

Lance clears his throat and drags his eyes off of Shiro's body as the older man pushes his damp hair back from his face. He knows what he's here for. Shiro's been on holiday in Cuba for the past six weeks and he's made the shop a part of his daily routine. Everyday at sunrise, Shiro comes out of the hotel down the street and swims for who knows how many miles. Enough that he always comes in here hungry, flushed and panting and only half the time remembering that the shop technically had a shirt and shoes policy. Well, Lance thinks, dragging his eyes down to the dark line of hair leading down from Shiro's navel into his low set shorts and back up again, he forgets to remind Shiro of that policy about half the time anyways, so fair's fair.

"Hunk's not in, tigre grande, so no breakfast for you just yet," Lance says. Shiro makes this thick, huffing laugh that has Lance dropping his pen on his stack of papers and resting his elbows on the counter because he knows even a hint of erection shows in the shorts he's wearing. 

"Sorry, I know I'm early today," Shiro says, his footsteps thudding on the floorboards as he wanders in. "Are you open, or should I come back later?" He's dripping all over the place and Lance thinks about salt flavored skin and mopping the floor at the same time.

"No, you can stay. I'm just getting ahead on paperwork," Lance says and fans the edge of the stack in front of him. Shiro fights with the little orange tube he has strapped tightly around his wrist. His fingers slip a little on the plastic before he pulls it off and sets it on the counter. He tries to wipe his wet hands on wet shorts and Lance finally has mercy on him and pulls out one of the small towels he has folded under the shelf besides his cleaning supplies. "The biggest clue that you're a tourist is that you leave your shit on the beach." 

"I don't-" Shiro huffs and wipes his hands, then his face and, oh god, those pecs have a nice little bit of give when Shiro drags the towel over his chest and down his belly. Well, Lance is really stuck in his chair now, he thinks as he shifts and tries to alleviate the tightness in his shorts. "Sorry, I'm pretty worked up today. I forgot it all in my room."

Lance thinks that he's certainly worked up too, but probably in a different way. He just grins and bats his eyes as Shiro scuffs his hair dry.

"What's got my big Amercian tigre so worked up that he forgets everything but his money in his room?" He loops his finger through the strap on the plastic tube and spins it lazily, letting it clatter over the wooden countertop. "Not that I'm complaining. Money is really the only thing I need from my tourists." Shiro's expression changes at that. Like he's almost shy and a little hurt. Lance scrambles to fix it.

"Well, and to have all my customers leaving thinking to themselves 'Oh, did you see that cute little Cuban boy in the surf shop? An even better view than the beach!' yeah? My dream is to endear the whole world you know," he teases. Shiro gives him a weak grin and is that a blush? Oh, Shiro's blushing a little and his heart doesn't quite know what to do about it.

"You are pretty endearing, Lance," Shiro says. Lance still feels showy and jokingly preens. 

"Well, yeah you know-" Shiro cuts him off. 

"That's what I'm so nervous about." Lance goes quiet then and listens intently. Shiro plays with the edge of the towel with his fingers, takes a deep breath. "I mean, It's my last day here and I wanted to drop in early and well..." Suddenly, he huffs and sets the towel back on the counter. "Sorry, forget it." 

Now Lance is burning to know what's on Shiro's mind because it sounded like he was into him. Was he into him? Because honestly no one is ever into him and there's no freaking way that Shiro thinks he's cute? Nah, he's just reading too far into this.

But he's gotta know. 

"No, come on. It's not nothing," Lance stands and leans over the counter to try and catch Shiro's eyes. He closes his hand around the orange tube. "I'm keeping your money hostage until you tell me. It can't be that big a deal, right?" Shiro hesitates, his scar fading under the flush in his cheeks. 

"I wanted to ask for your number or.. something. Anything," Shiro admits. "I really like you. You're nice and funny and well, you're cute, and I wanted to keep in touch?" Now Lance knows he's blushing just as hard as Shiro. He's glad Shiro had the forethought to come in here early and catch him on his own because he's going to need a minute to get back to normal. Who would have thought the first person to call him cute and ask for his number would be the hottest guy he's seen all summer? 

Lance clears his throat and thinks on what he's going to do. Give him his number and email, of course. But Varadero and...whatever part of America Shiro's from are a long way from each other. It's not often that Lance has repeat customers, much less between tourist seasons. So he's probably not going to see Shiro again after today. Lance holds the tube up and offers it. 

"Sure, as long as you give me your number too," Lance says. He grins to hide how nervous he is. "C'mere though. I have something else to give you." Shiro's eyes go wide and the nervous tension visibly melts out of his shoulders. He comes closer as Lance bids him and Lance reaches out for him, sets his fingers on Shiro's collar and pushes them up to cup the back of his neck and pull him over the counter and press their lips together. 

As he thought, Shiro tastes of saltwater and, when Shiro parts his lips and Lance can slip their tongues together, the faintest hint of toothpaste. Shiro makes this soft, hungry sound against Lance's lips and he twitches hard in his shorts where he's trapped against the edge of the counter. Lance can feel the goosebumps rise on the back of Shiro's neck as he scratches at the soft hair there. Shiro's just getting the nerve to thread damp fingers into Lance's hair when Lance looks out to the boardwalk in front of the store out of the corner of his eye. 

"Hold on," Lance says and pulls away. Shiro tries to follow him a little before he comes back to himself and straightens abruptly. 

"Too much?" he asks. Lance shakes his head and tries not to get distracted by the way Shiro's chest rises and falls as he pants. 

"No, Shiro, hold on. Let me-" He moves around the counter and to the door. "I wanna...Go to the bathroom, but don't lock it. The store isn't open yet so I have to close the doors real quick but I’ll follow you in?” He’s sure Shiro can plainly see how hard he is in his shorts now but he’s hoping that will work in his favor. 

There’s a long beat where Shiro just stares at him and Lance thinks that he’s blown it all. He’s taken it too far and he’s scared Shiro off. Or worse, he’s made the guy think he’s some kind of slut and now he’s lost his respect. But then Shiro seems to snap back into himself and looks around like he’s just remembered where he’s at. 

“It’s okay?” he asks. Lance breathes out some of his anxiety and walks past Shiro to the front doors, shutting them both with a soft clatter but leaving them unlocked in case Hunk decides to come by early. 

“It’s fine. Hunk shouldn’t be here for another,” he looks at the clock on the wall behind the front counter and sees that it’s just past 7:30. “Almost twenty minutes. So unless you have big plans for me we should be fine, right?” He steps back to Shiro and curls his fingers about a strong forearm. “If you want to. I don’t wanna lock you in here and have my way with you if you’re really just wanting to be friends.” Shiro shakes his head and lets Lance lead him towards the bathroom at the back of the store. 

“No, no. I definitely want to,” Shiro says. Lance opens the door, pulls Shiro in with him and locks it behind them. All at once Shiro crowds him in against the sink, his mouth latching on at the joint of Lance’s shoulder and sucking hard. “I really want to. I was getting pretty disappointed when I was too chicken to ask for your number earlier.”

Large hands slip under the front of Lance’s shirt, one gripping his hip while the other searches up along his torso. Lance is caught between taking his shirt off and clinging tight to Shiro. Ultimately he goes with the former and arches into the fingers rubbing circles around one of his nipples as he tugs his shirt off and tosses it to the far corner. Shiro sits up and Lance swears he can feel the heat of the man’s gaze dragging down the length of his body. 

“Shit, you’re beautiful,” Shiro breathes. His mouth is back on Lance’s collar and Lance runs his fingers over Shiro’s short hair as he moves further down. Soft lips part and a warm, wet tongue drags over his skin down the center of his chest. 

“Scared you were gonna miss out on me?” Lance asks. Shiro looks up at him through thick lashes and answers that by setting his mouth over a pert nipple and sucking hard. Lance shudders and gasps as heat curls low in his belly. Shiro suckles at him firmly and when he grips his ass hard through his shorts Lance gives a thin laugh for his eagerness. 

“I did!” Shiro insists. “I just wanted to get my mouth on you.” He pulls off his chest and mouths down a little further, almost to Lance’s navel before he stands again. He cages Lance in against the sink and when he brushes their lips together, soft and so gentle compared to all the heat he was just pressing on him, something warms in Lance’s chest and he can’t keep down his nervous smile. Shiro purrs and kisses the corner of his mouth. 

“You’re really cute, Lance,” Shiro breathes. Lance knows he’s blushing like a schoolgirl and tries to distract himself with Shiro’s muscled chest, trailing his fingers over Shiro’s pale skin striped with scars and wondering over how warm he is pressed against him. Shiro doesn’t seem to mind, or really notice and just keeps nuzzling over his cheek and nibbling at the shell of his ear. “I wanna take my time with you. I wanna know everything about you and I want to tell you everything about stuff back home.” Shiro presses his nose in Lance’s hair and breathes softly as he starts pulling at the front of Lance’s shorts. He tugs the tie free and Lance helps him push them down past his knees where he kicks them off. When Shiro tries to do the same with his underwear, Lance pulls back just enough sit on the edge of the counter and pull Shiro between his knees. 

Lance isn’t totally sure what to say, much less what to do. The only romantic experience he has is flirting with cute people who walk into his store and the week long fling he had with a girl in secondary school where they learned out to kiss and nothing more. Shiro was something entirely different. Shiro was big and all hard lines and muscle where he filled all the space between Lance’s thighs. His voice was thick and low and masculine in his ears. His hands felt rough as they pulled at his skin and Lance felt  _ small  _ with Shiro so close. 

And there was the whole issue of the heavy bulge he feels against his inner thigh. That’s something he doesn’t have the faintest clue about but Shiro seems to be losing patience. He’s rocking his hips slowly against him, his cock straining against Lance’s thigh. Lance runs his fingers down Shiro’s belly and, when he hooks his fingers into the waist of his trunks, Shiro groans and starts trying to help him pull apart the tie. Lance has to gently press his fingers away to have enough room and Shiro palms Lance’s cock through his underwear instead. 

“Slow down, tigre,” Lance hitches. Shiro’s got bigger hands than himself. It feels like it covers all of him and when Shiro uses his thumb to drag the cloth over the leaking head it makes Lance’s head swim. “I’m not going anywhere right now,” he pants. He gives the front of Shiro’s swimsuit a sharp tug to loosen it. He swallows hard as he wraps his fingers around Shiro’s cock and draws him free. Lance would definitely be jealous of being so outmatched if Shiro wasn’t arching his back and shivering like Lance is almost too much for him to handle.

“I know, but-” Shiro cuts himself off and licks his lips as his arousal slides through the tunnel of Lance’s fingers. Lance watches wide eyed as precome wells up in the slit and falls in a fat drop high on Lance’s inner thigh. It’s hot as it dribbles over his skin and Lance feels like he might burst just from watching and letting Shiro fuck himself into his hand. Even so it’s easy to tell Shiro is more worked up than he is and Lance tries his best to focus on giving Shiro what he needs. 

“I always knew my handsome American was big,” he purrs and starts working his hand up and down the length of him. Shiro pulls at Lance’s underwear with shaking hands and when he wraps calloused fingers around him Lance bites back a rather embarrassing whine. It’s different. It’s all different than just touching himself. Shiro’s fingers are thick and he’s a bit rougher than Lance likes it when it’s just himself doing the pleasing. But it’s not hurting him so Lance just plays along and presses into his touch in little rolling motions.

“Oh, Lance-” Shiro still leaks precome everywhere and soon Lance’s fingers are sticky with it, leaving glistening trails all down the length of Shiro’s cock. Lance tightens his grip a little, curious about what other men might like. He hardly has time to think of it before Shiro rubs his thumb over the head of Lance’s arousal and Lance goes stiff. Pleasure zings up the length of his spine, twists in his belly and he whimpers softly. He nudges Shiro a bit closer with his heels and the man is all too eager to accept, pushing him into the counter until he’s nearly falling into the sink and their fingers bump together as they stroke and tease the other. 

“Come for me?” Lance asks softly. He grips Shiro at the shoulder with his free hand to steady himself. He fights to find purchase with his knees but Shiro ruts too deep and fast for him to manage it. Lance doesn’t fight him on it too hard and leans back a little just in time to feel Shiro slow to a shuddering stop and come with a groan that rolls up out of his chest. Lance shivers and watches as Shiro comes in hot, pearly streaks over his chest and belly, so taken up by the sight that he forgets that he was even doing anything with his hand. 

Shiro’s chest heaves when he finally comes down and he bullies his way a bit closer so he can kiss Lance hard. Lance hardly notices when Shiro pulls his fingers off his softening arousal and just parts his lips for Shiro’s tongue. 

“You do it too, Lance,” Shiro breathes against his lips. His rough hand tugs Lance’s cock a bit harder, swallowing the soft whine Lance makes when his orgasm washes over him and leaves him shaking in its wake. 

The long minute after is filled with soft kisses and tangled tongues while they both catch their breath. Lance can’t complain. Kissing Shiro is rather nice; he takes the lead with an ease that feels natural. His whole body is a warmth Lance can get lost in. He only reluctantly pulls away when he remembers he has a shop to run and the edge of the counter is digging into the backs of his thighs deep enough to make his toes tingle and start to go numb. So he turns his head out of the kiss and lets Shiro give him a couple more down the side of his neck before he pushes gently at his shoulder. 

“Gotta clean up,” Lance reminds him. Shiro sighs as he stands up straight and puts his swimsuit back into order. His eyes still roam over Lance even as the younger man pulls several paper towels off the roll and cleans himself up. It smears more than he would like it to and he winds up trying to wet them behind his back without dripping water down the back of his underwear. Lance can’t make up his mind whether he wants to be flattered or self-conscious. 

“Thank you for that,” Shiro says, breaking the easy silence that had settled over them in the aftermath. Lance gives Shiro a look of confusion and balls up the paper towels before he drops them in the trash. He hops off the edge of the counter and tries not to stumble as he pulls his shorts back on because his legs are numb.

“Why? I’m the one who pretty much jumped you,” Lance asks. He washes his hands and steps aside to let Shiro do the same as he crosses the room to recover his shirt from the other side of the room. “All you asked for was my number, not a handjob.” Shiro gives a quiet laugh. 

“No, but to be honest I was kind of hoping for something like this,” he shrugs and Lance kneels to pull a spray bottle of bleach water from under the sink. He feels a little bad for doing this in front of Shiro; like he’s trying too hard to clean up what just happened but he can’t in good conscious make his other customers come in here without sanitizing the place. And he can only imagine the kind of hell Hunk would give him if he found out he had a quickie with a customer in here.“It probably wasn’t very good. I haven’t done something like that in...a long time.” Lance just shakes his head as he wipes down the sink. 

“Of course not. You been in Varadero for the past six weeks,” he says that, shrugs it off and puts his things back away before he washes his hands again. “Not like I don’t think you could pick up any girl out on the beach right now. You just don’t seem like the type?” he tries. No, that’s a stupid comment too. Lance gives up on trying to sound smart and just wraps his arms around Shiro’s chest instead, resting his forehead on Shiro’s collar. 

“You’re a really sweet guy and that just now was  _ really  _ nice,” he says. He kisses the hollow of Shiro’s throat when he feels Shiro’s arms wrap around his shoulders. “I’m gonna miss you, Shiro.”

Shiro kisses the top of his head and Lance nearly laughs and squirms away with nerves. Like a boyfriend instead of a customer who’s been popping in for the last few weeks. Lance heaves a sigh, squeezes him tight and pulls back. 

“Alright. Let me give you my number and then I’ll make sure Hunk feeds you something good,” Lance says. He unlocks the door and steps out into the main room of the store. Hunk’s still not in but, Lance looks at the clock, only just. By the time Shiro’s followed him out and he’s got the front doors open again Hunk’s coming down the boardwalk with a crate overflowing with fruits and vegetables in each arm. Lance trots out to help him, putting on his best smile as he takes one of the crates from Hunk, grunting at the weight. 

“You bought watermelon!” Lance complains because he knows that’s exactly what all the weight is. He’s about to set it down on the ground and readjust his grip when the crate lightens and Shiro’s gently taking it out of his arms. Hunk chuckles and pawns some plastic bags filled with several quarts of orange juice onto Lance instead.

“You’re here early, Shiro,” Hunk says once they’re all inside and sorting through everything. 

“I’m going home tomorrow so I wanted to drop in early and say goodbye,” Shiro says. Hunk shrugs and pulls out his cutting board. 

“That’s too bad. I liked having you over and Lance was always telling everyone about his  _ tigre grande _ ,” Hunk puts a little too much emphasis on the nickname for Lance’s liking so he sticks his tongue out and takes his bag of grapefruits over to the rental counter instead. 

“Yeah, and Shiro came over early specially for us because out of all of Cuba, he loves us the most,” Lance huffs. He motions Shiro over and pulls out a pad of paper and a pen, quickly writing down his full name, number and email address. He thinks for a beat and adds a note below that. “so I promised him that his breakfast would be on the house today,” he tags onto the end. He rips off the top page, folds it, and hands it to Shiro. Shiro only immediately unfolds it, reads it and gives him a double take. Lance has to very quickly pretend like his heart isn’t crawling out of his throat. 

Hunk growls like he’s bothered and looks between the two of them. Ultimately he must decide it’s not worth trying to pry any deeper and cuts his watermelon in half in one smooth motion. 

“Okay, but only if you promise to tell all of your friends that we have the best shop in Varadero.”


	2. A Little More

_ Text me your room number and a time to come over. To say goodbye.’ _

Shiro wonders if there’s still a point in actually taking Lance up on his offer. It’s nearing sunset now and he’s holed up on the balcony of his hotel room, his attention split between the beautiful reds and oranges glittering off the ocean and the worn strip of paper clutched between his fingers. 

He added Lance’s contact info hours ago but he hasn’t had the nerve to throw the note away. Lance has pretty handwriting, full of tiny loops just a little out of control, but which flow across the paper all the same. Shiro’s eyes crawl across the script and he thinks of the colorful little fish darting around in the aquarium down in the lobby. There’s a big angelfish in there with fins that trail off like the tail end of the heart Lance has tagged onto the end of his note. 

Shiro sighs and folds the paper up into a little square that he shoves into his jeans pocket. No, there’s no point in changing his mind now. Why does he have to read into this stuff? Lance is cute, he’s  _ adorable  _ and he’s sweet and he’s been such a good friend over the past six weeks he’s been in Varadero but they both know perfectly well that Shiro’s getting on a plane tomorrow morning. He’ll go back to Cleveland, back to work, and by the time next summer rolls around the features of Lance’s face will be fuzzy in his mind and Lance will have forgotten him completely. 

It’s easy to think that he only got Lance’s number because he popped into the store and caught him by himself. Hell, Lance probably gets gullible tourists asking for his number every week. Who wouldn’t be interested in a cute boy running a surf shop right on one of most beautiful beaches on the world? Shiro looks at his prosthetic hand. When he flexes it, he can just barely hear it whirring over the roar of the waves. He’s definitely asking Lance to scrape the bottom of the barrel. 

He thinks about the doodled heart, the short note and his mind wanders to the encounter he had in the bathroom in the back of the shop this morning. He thinks about himself a few years ago when he was cocky and fresh out of college and he wasn’t missing an arm or striped with scars. If he were in Lance’s shoes, he would have jumped on anything that looked at him with a modicum of interest too. 

So what was it? Lust? Hormones? Pity? 

His phone blinks to life on the table next to him with a sharp buzz that snaps him out of his thoughts. Lance’s name flashes on the screen as a text notification and Shiro’s throat grows tight with something akin to anxiety, maybe a tinge of regret. He lets the phone go dark again. He shouldn’t look. He definitely shouldn’t let himself get attached. What’s best is for him to just stay in here by himself, try to forget anything ever happened with Lance and just go home to be as normal as he can. 

But that text burns him. He’s honestly surprised that Lance has bothered to contact him at all; he’d half expected Lance to just toss his number in the trash. His phone buzzes again and Lance’s name reappears. The kid is more insistent than Shiro gave him credit for. So he finally gives in and plucks up his phone, thumbing over to the new texts.

_ ‘Shiro?’ _

_ ‘Am i not invited? :(’ _

Shiro taps into the textbox when his phone goes off again. 

_ ‘I bought u a medianoche. Its real good.’ _

Shiro can’t get more than a few letters in edgewise before his phone is shaking in his hands.

_ ‘Are you to busy?? Sorry’  _

There’s no way Shiro can leave Lance with nothing when he’s nearly buzzing his phone out of his hands. His brow furrows as he types out a reply as quickly as he can. 

_ ‘I’m here. I wasn’t sure how to reply and by now I thought it was too late. Do you still want to come?’  _ He hits send and Lance replies almost immediately. 

_ ‘Shiro!!’ _

_ ‘I have food. Give me ur room #!’  _ Shiro shakes his head as he types out the name of his hotel and the room number. Why does Lance think he can buy him over with food? He’d already treated him this morning. But his chest goes warm at how excited Lance seems to be about his reply. Shiro stands and goes back into his room. His phone goes off again as he slides the glass door shut behind himself. 

_ ‘Down the street 5 mins’ _

Shiro’s kicking his suitcase closed and hanging his towel from his morning shower over the shower rod when there’s a knock at the door. Even though he knew Lance was on his way he still feels a little rush of adrenaline when he opens the door. 

Lance is dressed in a white button up so thin Shiro can nearly see his tan skin through it. He definitely sees the darker line of his jeans low on his hips. He clears his throat and steps back before he can think too much about Lance sitting on the edge of the sink this morning and waves the younger man in. Lance steps in only far enough to set down the plastic bag he’s holding before he pulls Shiro into a tight hug. 

“I thought you were snubbing me,” Lance gripes where he has his nose buried in Shiro’s collar. 

“Sorry,” Shiro says. Lance doesn’t let him go and Shiro, feeling somewhat awkward, brushes his fingers through Lance’s hair. The short brunet strands slide silkily between his fingers. “I didn’t…” He doesn’t really know why. Well, he does, but telling Lance straight out that he was feeling self-conscious after that morning and that he didn’t  _ quite  _ believe Lance was being entirely genuine about this affection he’s showing probably wouldn’t go over very well. Lance hums against his throat, slips his fingers over the small of Shiro’s back to play with one of his belt loops before he pulls away to look him in the face. 

“You’re okay?” Lance asks. Shiro can’t quite make out what Lance is going for here. Sure, they had made some kind of friendship through the shop over the past month and change but some of that had changed to a weird tension now.They had crossed a threshold this morning, and Lance seems to be weathering it much better than himself. 

“Yeah, I’m okay. I’m just kind of...  I’m not sure how I feel about going home tomorrow,” Shiro says. The corner of Lance’s mouth pulls down into a small, pensive frown and he thumps Shiro gently in the side. 

“Not good?” Lance asks. Finally, he seems to realize that he’s still holding onto Shiro and pulls away, padding first to the dresser to set down the plastic bag he'd wondered in with and then over to the bed and spreading himself over it like he owns it. Shiro shakes his head and follows him, sitting on the edge next to Lance’s knees.

“No, it’s good,” Shiro says. Lance kicks off his sneakers and pushes further into the center of the bed. His shirt rides up over the waist of his jeans, little slips of skin showing in the spaces between buttons. “I have a nice job and a little house.” He pauses, thinking. “I miss my dog. But, I’ve...I don’t know. I’ve had a really good time here.” Lance purrs and sits up next to him, their knees bumping together. 

“It’s me, right?” Lance teases. “I’m known for that, you know. The picture of hospitality.” Shiro sighs at his preening. But, he’s more right than he probably realizes.

“Yeah, a lot of it,” Shiro admits at bit nervously. Lance gives him a cat’s grin, then sobers up a little and turns to face him better.

“Hey Shiro?” he asks and when Shiro lifts his brow to show he’s listening, “You’re okay about this morning?”He’s not totally sure where that comes from but Lance has this edge of concern on his face that he can’t ignore. 

“Yeah, of course,” Shiro says. Flashes of Lance’s flushed face, slim fingers wrapped around his cock. He thinks of the smell of bleach and salt, mingled breaths and eager kisses and Lance’s belly striped with dripping white lines of come. It was the most intimacy he’d had in years. “I loved it, why?”

Lance shifts a bit uncomfortably, his lip disappearing between his teeth. “I felt like I kind of short changed you this morning.”

What? Shiro had dared to hope to just get Lance’s number. He had  _ expected  _ Lance to laugh him off and decline him outright; to mark him off as a nice customer, but ultimately just another horny tourist in the end. Pulling him into the bathroom and breaking his three year dry spell was already more than Shiro could have dreamed. But now he hums and spreads his hand reassuringly across Lance’s back.

“I don’t think so. Were you worried about it?” Shiro asks. Lance moves again to face him, sitting up on his knees. Shiro eyes the bright blush on his cheeks and wonders wildly if Lance is at least a modicum as smitten as he is. 

“Yeah, kind of. Thought you might think I’m crazy but,” Lance visibly fights with himself. He seems to make his mind up about something and he runs his hands down Shiro’s back, pulling a shiver out of the older man. “Sorta wrote that note because I wanted more.” Lance’s voice goes a little breathy at the end and Shiro’s mind narrows in on it. He hums and sets his hand on Lance’s side, down over the soft, slight curve of his hip. 

“Really?” he asks and Lance makes this happy little sound when Shiro gives his hip a gentle squeeze, pressing closer when Shiro slips his fingers under the waist of his jeans. Lance takes the invitation and brushes his fingers over Shiro’s jaw. It’s easy to just let Lance pull him in and graze their lips together. 

“Is this what you mean about saying goodbye?” he asks. Lance purrs as their, their tongues sliding over each other. 

“You could say that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah I sat down and figured this needed a whole big thing. Lots of fluff planned. Lots of smut planned. Broke this chapter up cause I'm rude. Next chapter is just nothing but nsfw.


	3. Firsts and Lasts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *lowkey fixes some jankiness in the summary and solves the Mystery of the Missing Medianoche in chapter 2 with like one sentence*
> 
> I Suffer when writing sex scenes I'm so sorry. But I suppose all things count as practice. I hope it's half decent but more than once while I was writing this I was like 'Shut up! You two are so chatty! Stop getting distracted!'
> 
> I don't want to get too into the minute details but let me let you know. I plan 1. A lot of really gross fluff. 2. Shiro working through Some Problems because that poor man never gets a chance to do so in canon and I really just want him to be happy and mean it (read: Shiro angst) and 3. of course more smut, but it's off in the ether with the rest of this. This is some kind of trifecta, yes? 
> 
> Gotta say thank you to everyone who's been reading so far! I super appreciate all the love. Please continue to support me as I hurriedly type out all of my Shance feelings.

“Shiro!” 

Lance’s voice shakes as Shiro sets his lips to a tight nipple and sucks hard. Lance is warm under him, all tense, shivering muscle under Shiro’s hands. He drags them down smooth, flawless flanks and feels the soft bumps of his ribs. 

Shiro grazes his teeth over the bud and Lance shudders. When he starts digging his nails into the backs of Shiro’s shoulders, the older man grunts and pulls away. He sits up and guides Lance to touch over his chest instead. Lance chuckles and traces a thin scar high on Shiro’s belly. 

“I don’t mean to be prickly,” he breathes. He shuffles a bit, sets his knees to Shiro’s sides and crosses his ankles at the small of Shiro’s back. When he tugs him in their hips meet and bump together, the fabric of Lance’s briefs catching on Shiro’s denim jeans and pulling taut over his bulge for an instant. Shiro shakes his head and hooks his fingers in the waist of Lance’s underwear, easing them down over his hips. 

“It’s fine,” Shiro hums. He breaks the hold Lance has on him and pulls the briefs down long, long legs. He tosses them off the bed and reaches up for the little bottle of lube and one of the condoms Lance smuggled in with his grocery sack. He flicks the cap open, tossing the condom into the sheets, and Lance’s eyes go wide. “You’re fidgeting. Are you too nervous?” Shiro asks, the lube half tipped towards his palm. Lance brings his fingers up to his mouth, nibbles on his nails before he jerks them back and shoves his hands under the pillow beneath his head instead. 

“Yeah,” he admits. He nearly brings one of his hands down again, but then the headboard creaks when he grips the bottom edge of it and tugs gently. “I’m okay though.” Shiro’s inclined to believe him; Lance’s cock stands tight and proud against his belly, precome already gathering at the tip. The same sense he had this morning, of wanting to set his lips to him, swallow him down until Lance is squirming and clawing at his hair comes over him again and Shiro decides they’re about as warmed up as they’re ever going to get and coats his fingers with the lube. 

Lance tries to wrap his legs back around him but Shiro pushes him off, holding one firm thigh down to the sheets. He wants to see what he’s doing. 

“I was thinking about watching this,” Shiro explains and drags his slick fingers over Lance’s hole. Lance twitches at the first touch and whines when Shiro works the first finger into him. The younger man shudders and Shiro swears he can feel his pulse jump where he’s holding onto this thigh. The other bumps him in the ribs and Shiro turns his eyes up to find Lance chewing on his lip. 

“M’fine-” Lance says. He lets go of the headboard and tries to wave him off, but when Shiro nudges him with a second finger, he digs his fingers into the pillow and whines. Shiro sinks a second finger in besides the first, kissing at his collar and watching through his lashes how Lance fights to keep himself fully on his back. 

“Tell me if you’re not,” Shiro warns. He slides his fingers in deep and aches as he feels Lance’s body open up for him, so hot and tight he can’t imagine fitting his cock in there. He’s torn between giving in to the heat that settles like a lead weight in his belly and babying Lance as much as he can. Three years is a long wait but, Shiro thinks, steadying Lance’s cock with his free hand, three years is also plenty of time to forget what he’s doing here. 

Shiro drags his thumb over the leaking head and Lance jerks as if he’s touched a live wire. He arches his back, his hips jerking once against Shiro’s grip before he shudders to a stop and his walls hold onto Shiro’s fingers tight, seeming to draw him in deeper. 

“Calm down,” Shiro urges softly. He waits again until Lance seems to calm down a little. He looks dazed, his chest beating with thin, short breaths. When he loosens up a little, Shiro starts back to working him open. He drags his fingers out to the tip, pushes them back in to the knuckle and spreads them a bit. Lance chews his lip and a soft wrinkle forms in his brow when Shiro pushes him. 

“I-I am. Don’t worry about me is just- ugh-!” Lance cuts himself off with a soft groan. “Holy shit, you’ve got- mngh- you’ve got big fingers.” Shiro kisses him just under his chin.

“I want to get another in you before we go any further,” Shiro explains. Lance hitches, rolls his hips and shivers when Shiro thumbs the head of his cock, smearing precome over heated flesh. 

“Really?” Lance asks. Shiro almost stops, surprised at Lance’s surprise. But his pace is good and he nudges his twitching hole with the tip of a third finger, the other two scissoring inside. He’s getting used to it, flinching less and less as Shiro opens him up and the older man gains more confidence as Lance grows more pliant.

“That’s..” Shiro starts. He’s out of practice, but it doesn’t mean he’s completely inexperienced. “My partners in the past always said that worked best.” Lance nods and breathes slow through his nose, letting his thighs fall open. 

“Uh..okay. Try it then. You know better than I do,” A pause, then Shiro takes it as his cue to work the third finger in. Lance mewls as his body stretches to accommodate him and Shiro slows his pace for a bit to let him adjust. “I’m not- oh, fuck, Shiro…”

“You’re alright,” Shiro purrs. Lance is working with him now, taking deep breaths and not squirming so hard when Shiro spreads his fingers and once again tests his limits. Lance’s patience wears thin after only a couple minutes.

“Your-” He huffs. Trembling hands pull at the front of Shiro’s jeans. “Fuck me- C’mon…” he says, palming Shiro’s bulge through the denim. Need burns through Shiro. He eases his fingers out of Lance and helps him tug open his pants. He considers pulling away and taking them off completely but quickly shoves that idea to the side. Just enough to get himself free is all he needs. Lance sucks on his lip as Shiro rips open the condom wrapper and rolls the latex over himself. 

Slicked down with more lube, Shiro lines himself up and pushes in. The head breaches him and Shiro’s head swims. The tightness and heat he’d felt around his fingers is nothing compared what he feels now. Lance lets out a shaking moan as Shiro sinks deeper and deeper. When their hips meet flush a heavy moment sits between them. 

Their eyes meet and Lance looks just as out of it as he feels himself. A flush rests high on his cheeks, his short hair rumpled and spread on the pillow under him. His eyes, a pretty, deep blue Shiro sees now, glassed over in pleasure. Lance blinks and absently presses a hand low on his belly. 

“Oh my God…” he breathes. Shiro growls lowly in agreement when he feels the soft pressure of Lance’s prodding where he’s settled inside. He closes his eyes and focuses only on the little pulses in Lance’s body, the soft squeeze as Lance tests his boundaries. 

“Don’t do that,” Shiro warns. He rolls his hips and breathes deep at the friction of their bodies. “I’m not used to this.” Lance laughs weakly, sounding giddy.

“Me neither,” Lance says. He reaches for Shiro and only manages to paw at his chest, shakily tracing some of his scars. “Come on,” he urges finally and Shiro starts to move. 

As soon as he does all the instincts in his body scream at him to go harder, go faster. He just wants to  _ take,  _ bury himself in Lance as deep as he can. But he knows he doesn’t have the stamina for that; he’s already feeling that high building in his gut, spurring him into movement. If he’s not careful, it’ll end too quickly and leave Lance disappointed. 

“Shiro- I’m gonna-” Lance starts, then Shiro gives in to that pressing impulse and snaps his hips hard, just once, and grinds into Lance deeply. Lance trembles around him and can’t seem to figure out how to deal with Shiro finding his pace, just a little faster than what the older man feels is prudent. He’s all over the place, hips jumping with every sharp meeting of skin, his hands pulling at the pillow, at Shiro’s shoulders, nails raking bright red lines down Shiro’s arms. 

Finally, Lance settles on shoving one hand under the pillow again where he finds a handhold on the headboard and pulls it until it creaks softly. His other hand joins Shiro’s where it’s pumping his cock in time with his thrusts. Their fingers grow slippery between lube and precome and they tangle together around Lance’s bouncing prick. 

It all ends up with Lance gripping his wrist with slick fingers as Shiro fucks him into his hand. His need weighs on him and his thrusts grow slower, rougher as it presses him and every slap of skin force sharp mewls from Lance’s throat. Shiro feels like he’s sinking into a haze of near mindless need when Lance shudders and sinks his nails into the meat of his forearm. 

“Ngh-! I’m gonna-” Lance groans and all at once he’s coming apart into a shaking mess. He tightens around Shiro so firmly he all but forces the older man to slow to a deep grind. Shiro watches, rapt, as Lance comes over himself. He holds himself together long enough to milk Lance through it until the younger man sobs and tries to push him away, oversensitive. But then Lance  _ looks  _ at him, pupils blown wide and lips glossy and wet where he’s been biting them and Shiro’s high rushes through him so intensely it leaves him light headed. 

He groans as he comes down, his cock giving one last hard twitch in Lance before he eases out. Lance gasps when they come apart and Shiro sees his hole twitch before he turns his attention to disposing the condom in the trash. Lance sighs and sinks further into the sheets, stretching his legs out when Shiro moves out from between them. 

“Feels funny…” Lance says, Shiro hums and tries to stand from the bed, intending to get a washcloth for them, but Lance grabs him by the back of the neck and hauls him back over him. “C’mere.”

“Funny? You’re alright?” Shiro asks. He doesn’t mind Lance trying to manhandle him. He doesn’t mind much of anything right now. This fuzzy high he’s got settles over him like a warm blanket. He’s missed it; that deep sense of satisfaction that comes from bedding someone. Something he hasn’t felt in a long while. 

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Lance says. He brushes his lips over the line of Shiro’s jaw and when Shiro catches his lips instead, he opens for him easily. “I just figured it would be like...I don’t know. I thought it’d go away pretty much as soon as you pulled out.” Shiro’s brow furrows. 

“You figured? You didn’t know?” Shiro asks. Lance chuckles and glances away from Shiro’s firm stare. 

“That was my first time going uh.. Going that far,” Lance admits. Shiro narrows his eyes. On one hand, he’s his own best reference.  _ He  _ knows he wouldn’t do anything to hurt Lance. But on the other, he very, very much doubts Lance knows it too. 

“Lance, that’s dangerous!” he admonishes. Lance stares off beyond his shoulder, pouting. He glances back at him, then away again quickly and Shiro has a very clear image of his own dog when he catches her stealing food. “You don’t know me! I could be crazy! I could hurt you!” Lance wrinkles his nose. 

“Don’t give me that after the fact, Shiro,” he shuffles out from under Shiro and looks around the room. “I don’t see any kidnapping supplies in here. I’ve never seen you with any buddies while you’re here. I nearly had to kick your door in for you to even let me in here tonight,” Lance looks at him and after a short pause, grins, and strikes a little pose. “Besides, good luck getting me through customs. Everyone in the airport would love the chance to rescue me.” Shiro heaves a heavy sigh and pushes up off the bed. 

“That’s not the point,” Shiro starts. Lance waves him off immediately. 

“You think I’m shallow. How rude,” he huffs, but it’s clear he’s not too upset. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but I wasn’t sure how. I just…” Lance turns more serious. “I like you. Like, I know that it’s not like we got to spend all our time together and I was always at work and stuff but, knowing that you’re going back tomorrow.” Lance shrugs. “You came and asked for my number this morning and when you said that you wanted to keep in touch. I was really happy. I just felt like I was letting something good pass by me if I didn’t come over. Even if we did just end up talking and not any of the sex stuff.” 

Shiro lets him speak his piece and nods in understanding when he finishes. He gets it, that feeling of a miss opportunity. The feeling that he’d be kicking himself later on if he didn’t find some way to keep in touch with Lance. It was why he’d finally stepped out of his shell after so many years. Since he’d lost his arm. Since he’d crash landed. 

Shiro sighs and pulls himself forcibly out of that line of thinking. “I understand that,” he says and heads towards the bathroom to get the towels he’d initially set out for. “It’s been awhile since I’ve,” he ducks into the bathroom before he says more, so he can speak over the water running in the sink rather than to Lance’s face. “Since I’ve been in a relationship. I don’t think anyone would have had to try very hard to convince me.” 

“But you would have picked me if you had a choice,” Lance says. Shiro finds him perched on the edge of the bed when he comes back with a couple wet washcloths, very clearly trying not to touch anything with his slick hands. Shiro gives him one, then starts rubbing him down with the other. Lance flinches at the cool touch but weathers it as he wipes down his hands, shivering. Shiro smiles fondly.

“Probably,” he admits. He’s been like a high school boy with Lance for the past couple of weeks, all nerves and unwarranted bouts of shyness whenever he was around the younger man. It had taken all he had to gather up the bravery to ask him for his contact information this morning. “If it were guaranteed. I probably wouldn’t have been brave enough to ask if I thought there was a chance you would turn me down.” 

“What? Why?” Lance says. He seems to think he’s clean enough and simply tosses his cloth into the floor by their discarded clothes. Shiro shrugs and helps Lance back into the center of the bed, half expecting Lance to try and fight him off and start dressing again. But Lance seems perfectly happy to tuck himself into the crook of Shiro’s shoulder when Shiro settles his arm around his waist. 

“Because you’re out of my league?” he asks. Lance pulls back and gives him a look of disbelief. 

“That’s weird because I would have said the same thing,” he says.

“That you’re out of my league?” Shiro retorts. Lance flaps his hand irritably.

“ _ No.  _ That  _ you’re  _ out of  _ my  _ league,” he pauses. “I’m a little turned around,” he admits. 

“Mm..” Shiro agrees. “Me too,” he says. He closes his eyes to rest, but Lance still shuffles around at his side. 

“I mean you’re hot as hell, Shiro,” Lance says quietly, as if he thinks Shiro’s already asleep. Shiro opens one eye and smiles. He cups Lance’s jaw in his hand, the prosthetic one, and pulls him into a soft kiss. 

“Thanks. You’re pretty hot too,” he hums. Lance flushes and peppers kisses over his cheek. 

“Hey Shiro?” and when Shiro hums his acknowledgement, “What time are you leaving tomorrow?”

“My flights at seven, so I wanted to get out of here around five thirty.” Another pause, and Lance drumming his fingers on Shiro’s ribs. 

“Can I stay the night then?” Lance asks. Shiro nods and Lance settles more securely into his side. 

The next morning, as he’s getting dressed, Shiro thinks that one of his favorite things about Lance is the way he looks at him. It had been an exercise for him to go out to the beach without his shirt on while he’s been in Cuba. He’s gotten stares. So many questions about his cybernetic arm and his scars. 

But Lance has always taken them both in stride and even, like now, looks at him in a way he finds flattering. Lance is stretched out on his side right now, tangled up in the white sheets with his chin propped in his hand. He watches Shiro with hooded eyes and for once Shiro feels confident under someone’s gaze. Shiro pulls his shirt on and Lance rolls out of bed. 

“I’d go to the airport with you but I can’t get back before work with the traffic,” Lance says. He pads over to where Shiro’s pulling his suitcase upright and wraps his arms tight around his chest. 

“I get it. It’s not a big deal,” Shiro says. He hugs him back, squeezing Lance until he groans against his collar. “I’m gonna miss you,” he admits. He moves to kiss the side of Lance’s head, but Lance avoids him and their lips meet instead. 

“Me too,” Lance makes to pull back, changes his mind and pecks him again. “You’re gonna tell me when you get home?” he asks. Shiro lets go of Lance to grip his suitcase, but Lance hesitates for a second. 

It settles over him then, that he’s not coming back. At least not anytime soon. Lance doesn’t live in Cleveland. Lance doesn’t even live in the United States. From now on their relationship would be nothing but emails and phonecalls. 

What relationship was that, really? He’d gotten Lance’s number and they had sex. It’s not anything to build something meaningful on. He didn’t know anything about Lance’s family, what he liked, what his past was. He only knew his last name was Rivera because he’d written it down for him the day before. Lance finally lets him go and steps back.

It was nice to pretend that what was between them meant more than it truly did for one night. Now it hangs between them. They’re just two different people who hardly know each other about to part ways after a decent one night stand. Shiro looks at Lance.  _ Really  _ looks at him, from his olive skin, short brunet hair and those deep blue eyes. 

“Of course,” Shiro says.

He’s not coming back.

His heart is a heavy weight in his chest. 


	4. Introductions

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That feel when you write out like seven different scenes and then decide to settle on only two. That whole 'only write what moves the story along' thing. 
> 
> Which means here's almost 3,000 words of my headcanons and some super boring worldbuilding. I'm so sorry.
> 
> So! I have a much firmer idea of this plot after a certain point. But between now and a scene a short ways down the road, it's kinda foggy. I definitely have a couple ideas for smut scenes but that doesn't make a healthy relationship!
> 
> So I wanna ask you guys for ideas! Anything for their first date? Subsequent dates? Primarily I need ideas for fluff but don't let that keep you from throwing ideas around. You can send anything that you'd like to see and if it doesn't fit here I'll try to make it up to ya. I'd hate to have like three chapters of shoehorned skype conversations (like the one in this chapter lol) but I'm so freaking bad at slow burn.

Shiro’s been home for little more than an hour when Matt drops in. Shiro’s sorting through his mail when he hears his dog bark from outside the door. It’s all the warning he gets before Matt scuffs the door and pushes it open. 

“Hey,” Matt greets. Shiro’s dog, a Japanese Akita, barrels between Matt’s legs and nearly knocks him over trying to get to Shiro. He shakes the leash off his wrist and Shiro has to push back from the dining room table to make room for the large dog pushing into his lap. 

“Hi, honey,” Shiro coos. He digs his fingers into her soft fur, fluffing up her cheeks as she licks his hands. “I missed you too.” He unclips her out of her harness as Matt sits down across from him. “Yuri didn’t give you too much trouble, did she?” Shiro asks. Matt shakes his head. 

“No. I honestly wondered how well she would take leaving Katie. They’ve been joined at the hip since you left,” he explains. Shiro laughs and watches as Yuri sniffs around the kitchen, then pads down the hall and upstairs. 

“That’s good. I was worried about leaving her for so long. I’ll give Katie some money for dog sitting for me,” he sets aside the thick stack of mail. Matt pauses, thinking. 

“How was it?” He asks. Shiro picks up on the soft change of tone immediately. He’s used to it; the subtle way people ask about his well-being without bringing up the subject outright. 

“It was good. I managed everything I wanted to,” Shiro says. He tucks his finger into the collar of his shirt and pulls it out towards his shoulder, showing off the even tan that goes all the way from neck to wrist, broken only by his scars. “It took me three or four days, but then I thought about having a farmer’s tan and it was enough to motivate me,” Shiro says, half joking.

A smile pulls at Matt’s lips and he relaxes a little into his chair. “That’s really good. You look good. A tan like that works on you,” he says. Shiro waves off his flattery with a grin. 

“The beach down there is nice,” Shiro says. “The sand is so white. Really fine. The ocean was warm too so I could go out and swim early without much trouble.” It also meant he could catch Lance when his shop opened under the guise of getting breakfast. 

“You try to surf or anything?” Matt asks. Shiro shrugs. 

“I tried.” He didn’t, not really. On several occasions he had rented a board from Lance just for the chance to talk to him a bit more. But every time he took the board out into the surf, he could never stand up on it. He always got nervous about being tossed off, lost to the waves. It reminded him too much about the crash, that deep set feeling of helplessness that he’s never quite felt again. He didn’t dare edge too close to anything that threatened to bring it up. Instead, he would spend hours floating in the surf, rolling along with the waves and trying his best to acclimate himself to the feeling. “I couldn’t get over how the ocean would throw me around when I was on it. I liked swimming too much.” 

“Yeah,” Matt agrees. “I can get that. I’d probably not even try. Otherwise, you had fun?” he asks. Again, that silent question of whether he’s truly okay or if the trip had been six weeks of Shiro forcing himself to get over a few little things. 

“No otherwise. It was a nice trip,” Shiro assures him. “I-I think it did a lot of good for me.” He believes that. It feels weird to be back home after so long, but it’s in a good way. He feels more alive and more connected to the world around him. He’s missed Cleveland, he’s missed his friends and for the first time after a long string of months, he’s actually excited about socializing and catching up with them. 

“I’m glad you’re okay. You deserve it,” Matt says. The click of nails on the wooden floor and Yuri returns with a purple cat plush clutched in her jaw. He’s never seen it before, but he has little doubt that Katie was the one to give it to her. Shiro nods his thanks and turns his attention to Yuri when she shoves the cat into his hands. 

“What’s this? Have you been getting presents while I’ve been gone?” He tries to take the cat but Yuri snaps up one of the legs and starts a game of tug of war.

* * *

 

Lance seriously just considers just putting up a sheet. He’s spent the past hour cleaning (which is probably a lot more than his little studio apartment really needs) but every time he checks around the room, he finds another little thing to shift, something to hide. Lance is kneeling and putting his bottle of dish soap under the sink. It’s only half full and the color is all mixed and weird because the remnants of the last bottle is still in it. 

But what would Shiro think if he didn’t see any dish soap at all? Probably that Lance  _ never  _ did dishes. That he lived like an animal on styrofoam plates and plastic silverware. A shudder runs down Lance’s spine. He’d probably lose all of Shiro’s respect before they even got to  _ really  _ know each other. So Lance heaves an irritated sigh and gives in, setting the dish soap back where it belongs on the edge of the sink. It’ll have to do. 

He thinks of the sheet again but… He doesn’t really have a way to hang it up. Or any space to put it. And it would probably be kinda creepy, he supposes. Like he’s calling from a warehouse and demanding a ransom kind of creepy. Lance glares at the laptop sitting on his tiny dining table. 

“You’re already stressing me out too much and you haven’t even called me yet,” Lance growls. The laptop only displayed the black box of an empty call screen, Shiro still showing up as offline. Which, it turned out, his name wasn’t Shiro. It was  _ Takashi Shirogane.  _ Lance found it a wonderfully exotic sounding name. And there was a sense of masculinity that came with the fact that Shiro went by his surname.

Lance goes to the sliding glass door leading out to the balcony and pulls it shut. That’s enough fresh air, and he doesn’t need the breeze blowing everything around when he’s trying to talk. Then across the room again to the kitchen. He nudges the vanilla scented candle sitting on the kitchen counter carefully into view of the computer. It shouldn’t take too long for it to make the room smell nice now that he’s got the door closed. 

Speaking of smell… He’d showered, right? Yeah, just a few hours ago. Oh, he couldn’t stand himself. Who showered before a  _ video  _ call? He’d showered last night, too and it’s not like smell-o-vision exists. But he’d been flitting around so much while he cleaned that he’s sweat a little bit. He worries about looking icky and thinks of taking another shower. Just to be sure. 

But the clock says he’s only got a few minutes before Shiro promised to call him. He can’t shower, much less get his hair dry. He’d much rather show up on time, with his hair nice and fluffy dry instead of late and dripping wet because he’d cut it too close. 

He’s just fixing his hair when the laptop rings. Lance flinches back with a gasp. Shiro’s name shows on the screen and Lance quickly settles into his chair, using the black part of the screen to make sure he looks  _ perfect  _ before he answers. 

Shiro’s video feed pops in before his own. Lance heart clenches tight at the sight of him, and the feeling spreads to his lungs when Shiro sees him too and his whole face lights up in a wide smile. 

“Lance!” Shiro calls. Lance feels like he can’t breathe. He’s so handsome! Was he always this handsome? How had Lance put up with him walking shirtless and wet into his shop for so many weeks? How had he  _ had sex with him _ ? Lance manages a weak wave and a quiet greeting while he tries to recover from the sudden rush of...God, what even was it? He was like a freaking kid again. 

“Hold on, it’s darker on my end then I realized,” Shiro says, like he doesn’t even realize Lance is having a freaking heart attack. Shiro stands and moves out of frame and it feels like Lance can breathe again, though his hands are still nearly shaking in nervous excitement. 

There’s a futon on the other side of the room Shiro’s in and when he moves, a lump on the bed moves to track him. Lance squints and when it flicks one of its ears he realizes it’s a big dog curled up on its side. 

“Is that your dog?” Lance asks as Shiro sits back in his chair. He must have opened some curtains because the room has more natural looking light in it that makes the dog squint cutely. Shiro nods and glances back at the futon. 

“Yeah, that’s Yuri,” he says. At the sound of its name, the dog perks up, but quickly loses interest and lays its head on it’s paws. “We just got back from a run so she’s taking her afternoon nap.” Lance watches as the dog twitches one of its paws and settles in. 

“She’s really pretty. You said her name is Yuri?” Lance asks. It’s a cute name, and of  _ course  _ Shiro would have a super cute dog.

“After Yuri Gagarin,” Shiro explains. Lance tries to act like he knows what Shiro’s talking about but the name draws a total blank in his mind. So after a couple seconds of hard thinking, he gives up. 

“Sorry, I don’t think I know who that is,” he admits. Shiro shakes his head. 

“I don’t blame you. It’s uh...Well, Yuri Gagarin was a Russian cosmonaut. In 1961, he was the first person to go to space,” Shiro says. Lance can see how his expression changes a little, how his eyes light up. And he could name off all those details off the top of his head. Shiro opens his mouth like he wants to talk more but stops himself. “I just admired him and thought Yuri was a cute name for my dog.”

“It is a cute name,” Lance assures him. He sets his elbow on the table and puts his chin in hand. “You seem to know a lot about that guy. You into space stuff?” Lance asks. Shiro shrugs, looking a little nervous. 

“Yeah, I am. I’ve always been really interested in it ever since I was a kid. There’s just so much out there you know?” Shiro shifts in his chair and he takes on the expression of someone given a chance to talk about something he loves. “We’ve gone all the way to Kerberos. To the end of the solar system, but that’s not even a speck of what’s in the universe and-” he cuts himself off, a flush on his cheeks. “Sorry. It’s really easy for me to get started on that,” Shiro says. Lance purrs. 

“I don’t mind. It’s always really satisfying to hear someone gush, you know?” he says. “So, dream job would be at NASA?” he asks. Shiro’s blush only grows, the scar across his nose showing up a little more. He opens his mouth, thinking. 

“Yeah. I do work with NASA,” Shiro says. Lance tries not to let his surprise show but he feels that does little good for him. 

“Holy crap, really?” he breaths. Shiro is quick to wave him off. 

“Not- Not doing anything  _ interesting.  _ I just do research,” Shiro says. “It’s only a desk job, really.” Lance fights not to roll his eyes. 

“You don’t have to be all modest about it, Shiro. Research for NASA is super cool. I mean, you’ve seen where I work. I’ve got location, but it’s not exactly rocket science,” he jokes. Shiro makes a small, breathy laugh at that. Lance thinks he really likes the sound of it, deep and rich through his speakers. “So it’s like bigwig stuff right? Can you tell me what you do?” 

“It’s mostly aeronautics. Engines, suits, ways to keep astronauts from floating around the ship when they’re trying to sleep,” he says. “Sometimes it feels like we’re just tweaking the little things. There’s some experimental stuff, but for the most part we just try to refine what we have.”

“Do you do like, put each other into cryosleep and stuff?” Lance asks. Shiro laughs again, louder, and the sound seems to roll over Lance’s skin. He shifts in his chair, crossing his legs. 

“No, we don’t. I can’t tell you specifics but, I promise, it’s not anything cool,” Shiro says. Lance leans in a bit more.

“Okay, but do you know any astronauts? Buddies with the guys who actually go up there?” he asks. Shiro doesn’t answer him immediately. His jaw tightens and his prosthetic hand drops to the desk with a metallic thud. He doesn’t answer, and as the silence drags on for several seconds Lance starts to grow uncomfortable. Had he hit a sore spot? He tips his head as if he could actually meet Shiro’s eyes. 

“Sorry-” he speaks up. Shiro’s eyes clear up again and they dart around before they settle on the screen again. “I-” Shiro cuts him off.

“I’m sorry. I was thinking about something. Yes, I do know a couple astronauts, but I don’t see them very often. They tend to hang around Texas and Florida where they actually do launches. They only come up to Ohio for visits.” Shiro says. Lance sees him take a deep breath before he’s more or less back to normal. “So, you know I spend my nights lurking around with a telescope. What about you? Do you have any hobbies?” Lance chews his lip. 

“Yeah… but it’s not very cool,” he says, hesitating. He glances to the side at the basket of yarn he keeps beside his couch, the half finished project sitting atop. 

“Are you sure?” Shiro seems to hesitate. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but I’m interested.” Lance thinks for a second before he gives in. It’s only fair. 

“I knit,” Lance admits. Shiro looks amused. “It’s not like I just woke up one day like ‘I wanna knit’. Nana taught it to all of us kids and,” he shrugs. “I guess I’m the only one who stuck with it.” 

“So you’ve always knitted?” Shiro asks. He seems genuinely interested and Lance looks back at his basket. “Do you like making anything in particular?” 

“Yeah, I have a niece and a nephew that I like making toys for,” Lance says. “Do you wanna see what I’m working on now?” Shiro nods. Lance stands and gathers up the bits of his current project. He brings it back and holds it up for Shiro to see the half formed black lion. It’s still missing a tail and three of its limbs, but he thinks it’s coming along rather well. 

“Lance, that’s adorable,” Shiro says. Lance holds it up for another second before he sets it aside on the table. “It looks really nice. I’m sure your niece and nephew loving getting presents from you.” 

“Yeah, they seem to like it well enough. They’re hardly old enough to be in school, so I think they like just about everything I come up with. It takes a long time to finish anything because the shop eats up a lot of my time but it’s something I hope they’ll hold on to for awhile,” Lance says.

“It sounds like you have a big family,” Shiro says. Lance nods. 

“A ton. There’s Nana, Papa, my mom and dad, an older brother, and two older sisters. And the neice and nephew, who are my brother’s kids,” Lance counts them all off on his fingers. 

“That must be busy,” Shiro adds. Lance hangs his head dramatically, pulling another chuckle from Shiro. 

“It’s crazy sometimes, but what can you do? You just have to love ‘em,” he says. “What kind of family do you have?” 

“Small,” Shiro says and points behind him at the lump of dog on the futon. “It’s just Yuri and I here, and my dad lives in New York. That’s all there is. Family reunions are pretty lowkey.” 

“Quiet?” 

“Very quiet. The friends I have here are like family to me, so I guess I should include them, but most of the time it’s just me and the dog. A lot of evenings we just go for a run and crash until sundown,” Shiro pauses. “That sounds really boring, but it’s good enough. Yuri’s wonderful and it’s worth it to work where I do.” Lance purrs and crosses his arms on the table, leaning in.

“That’s okay. I don’t mind keeping you company.”


	5. Call

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was going to write their date into this chapter too but then this one freaking sex scene got so long (why?) I thought I would just post it by itself. That said, I have the next two (maybe three) chapters planned out in the specifics so I'll try to get them out a bit faster. 
> 
> In other news I finally caved in and made a tumblr for my Voltron crap. There's not much on it right now but you can find me at quiddity25.

_ He's lying on his side in his own bed, the sheets kicked down to the foot of the mattress, watching the curtain over the balcony door billow in the light breeze. He knows it's the middle of the night, but the moonlight is almost unnaturally bright where it comes in through the balcony door. It gives everything a blue tinge, the whole room washed out and almost ethereal.  _

_ There's someone in his house. He knows that for sure. It's just a simple fact. They're stretched out on the bed behind him, but Lance feels relaxed, a little tired.  _

_ They slide their hand up his leg. It's warm, broad and slightly rough. Thick fingers spread wide over the back of his thigh, gripping a handful and squeezing him lightly. The tips of their fingers tuck up under the hem of his short sleeping shorts and warmth wells up low in his belly.  _

_ Fingers press up further, tease along the swell of his ass and Lance hears himself purr. He wants to turn and see who's touching him, but as another hand worms between him and the bed and slides flat under his shirt, he decides not to worry.  _

_ Lance finally, with much thought, pulls his eyes away from the billowing curtains to look down at himself. One hand, pale and lined faintly with scars, grips the thin material of his shirt and tugs it up to his chest. The other is darker and gleams with a metallic edge as it tucks between his thighs.  _

Shiro.

_ It’s Shiro pressed flush against his back, Shiro’s hands cupping the bulge in his shorts, shoving up under his shirt and playing with his nipples. Lance burns under his touch. He arches his back, trying to grind back on Shiro but no matter what he can’t quite seem to touch him. Just a brush, a glance of skin on skin and that’s it.  _

_ Shiro palms Lance’s cock until he’s fighting between wriggling away and pushing further into his touch. Lance reaches behind him, using all his focus to grope for Shiro. He can feel his warmth down the length of his back but when he grasps with his fingers, he’s always just out of reach. So he reaches, reaches… _

Lance snaps awake with his own whimpering in his ears. He lays there, panting, his whole body feeling flushed. He shifts and his shorts pull tight over his cock. Lance groans and rolls onto his back, kicking the blankets down to the foot of the bed. 

That was certainly the most intense wet dream he’s ever had. Lance glares down at the tent in his shorts with a low growl. Damn Shiro and his stupid, sexy voice. They’d been skyping a few times a week for little more than a month now but it had never prompted  _ that  _ kind of response before. 

Lance pulls the pillow further under his head, makes himself comfortable. So he’s frustrated. No big deal, and not all that surprising. It’s an easy fix. Lance teases the tips of his fingers along the bottom hem of his shirt and when he dips them underneath he feels flushed and sensitive. He curls his fingers under his shirt and tugs it up to his ribs before Shiro pops back into his mind. 

It’s Shiro’s fault he’s like this, stretched out on his bed and tenting his shorts at what, seven in the morning? Lance pauses with his hand resting low on his belly and his cock fighting against the fabric of his shorts. He stares at the ceiling and pulls his lip between his teeth. His phone is right next to him on the nightstand, but does he dare use it?

He’s tempted, but anxious. He’s never tried to contact Shiro this early in the morning at all, much less while he’s all wound up and horny. Lance glances at his phone and whines. He really needs it. He wants to share it with Shiro and bring that part of their relationship back up, but part of him is scared to try.

Maybe Shiro would turn him down. Maybe it would be awkward. Ever since Shiro had gone back home, it was like those encounters in the shop and Shiro’s hotel room never happened. Shiro had only ever been sweet and friendly and sure, Lance loved that about him but… Lance frowns at his arousal. It’s starting to leave him frustrated. 

It’s probably because he’s horny, but he’ll give it a shot. If Shiro isn’t interested he can just let the matter rest and take a cold shower instead. Lance crosses one leg over the other, rocking them back and forth and trying to stave off his need long enough to see if Shiro’s even awake and willing to talk to him. He pulls up Shiro’s number, sees the picture of Yuri he’d sent Lance the other day, and starts texting. 

_ ‘Good morning. ;3’  _ Lance sets his phone on his chest and groans softly. He prays that Shiro answers quickly because that dream is  _ eating  _ at him. While he waits he gives in and sets his palm over his arousal, rocking softly into the weight. 

Lance is left teasing himself for only a couple of minutes before his phone buzzes on his chest. He snatches it up again, squinting at the bright screen. 

_ ‘Good morning. I didn’t think you would be up yet when the shop is closed. Sleep good?' _ Lance's cheeks warm. He's so sweet! He can't take it. First thing in the morning and he's already asking after him. 

_ 'Good enough. I had a dream about you,' _ Lance replies. 

' _ Really? It wasn't bad was it? _ ' From the tightness in his shorts, Lance certainly thinks not. Lance shivers, nervous, as he stares at his phone. How does he steer this?

_ 'Frustrating,' _ Lance answers. Not enough. He adds another text.  _ 'I woke up and you weren't here,' _ Lance sends it and curses himself in the same second. That’s so sappy! He sounds like a horny teenager (which, okay, he's only a couple years removed from that but it's not  _ accurate _ anymore) and he totally expects Shiro to just brush him off. At least Shiro doesn't leave him hanging for too long.

_ 'I know. I'm sorry. That happens to me sometimes too,' _ Lance squints at the text. What did that mean? Did Shiro intend that innocently or not? Did he get all of Lance's meaning? Was he reciprocating Lance's attempts at sexting or was he totally brushing him off? 

Either way, Lance rubs his thighs together, whining at the little bit of friction on his cock. He can see it, Shiro waking up horny, stretched out on his back in bed, his fingers dipping into his boxers...

Lance groans in frustration and doesn't reply immediately in favor of palming in his cock warmly. He takes a deep breath and drags the pad of his thumb along the soft bump of his ridge through his shorts. He's gotta think of a way to catch Shiro's interest, but it's a little hard to accomplish that when he's worked up like this. Eventually he manages to stop teasing himself and pick up his phone again. 

_ 'I miss you,' _ Lance types. A pause, thinking.  _ 'Are you at home right now I wanna send you a pic.' _ Lance sends it and feels like he's about to choke on his own heart. A little heavy handed, maybe, but hopefully Shiro gets his meaning.

_ 'A pic? I'm home. It's just me so go ahead.'  _ That sounds like Shiro knows what he's talking about, what with the mentioning that he's alone, but he can't be sure. Lance rolls onto his side, groans in frustration and turns onto his back again. Maybe he should just send a selfie. Maybe he should just totally forget about this. It's too weird and maybe he shouldn't  _ really _ trust his own judgement when he's aroused. 

But he’s been wanting this and he’s already got Shiro waiting on him. Lance frowns, forces himself to take a deep breath. He trusts Shiro not to be mean to him if there’s been a misunderstanding. He’ll never get anything he really wants if he chickens out. 

So he taps over to his camera app and points it down the line of his body. He crosses his legs and bends them at the knee, spends a bit of time playing with the angle and light. His shirt is still bunched up around his ribs but he tugs it down again close to his navel. Make the wrinkles more tasteful. Not quite right. He adjusts how his shorts rest on his thighs letting them ride up in such a way that his bulge is plainly visible. At least the bright yellow shorts he’s wearing look good with his skin tone and doesn’t wash him out. 

Okay, maybe seven pictures is too many. Maybe he took too much time because it’s several minutes before he picks out the best of his efforts. He sends it to Shiro, fingers shaking, and tosses his phone in the sheets. No! He didn’t just do that! He didn’t just send a dirty pic to Shiro! He’s almost as nervous as he had been buying condoms and bringing them to Shiro in his hotel room more than a month ago and that night he had felt he was going to  _ die  _ in the elevator.

And to his horror Shiro doesn’t respond to him immediately. Lance lays there, still hard in his pants for a couple of minutes (which feel like half an hour) before he hears his phone buzz in the sheets next to him. 

He doesn’t want to look. Shiro’s gonna tell him he’s gross. He’s asking him what the hell is wrong with him. Lance groans and has a wild thought of just never picking up his phone again. Which is, of course, why he caves and plucks it up not four seconds later. 

_ ‘You’re beautiful.’  _ Lance stares, reads the text over and over. Is he gonna cry? He might cry. Shiro’s honestly like  _ way  _ too good for him. Another deep breath. Be cool. He’s not cool. His fingers are shaking as he tries to type out a reply. 

_‘Not weird?’_ Lance writes. Shiro answers him quickly.

_ ‘No ofc not. Nervous?’  _ Can he read his mind? 

_ ‘Yeah never did this before,’  _ Lance admits even as he reaches down and palms himself again, puffing softly as heat rolls low in his belly. Shiro responds and breaks his distraction.

_ ‘It’s okay. You’re doing good. Can I see more?’  _ He wants more? That does a lot to soothe Lance but he still feels self conscious as he hooks his thumb in the front of his shorts. He pushes them down slowly, hissing as the fabric drags over his cock. He comes free and he holds it near the base, letting himself rest low on his belly, the head gleaming where his precome has smeared. As much as he wants to just jerk himself off he takes a picture instead, sending it to Shiro with a bit more confidence. 

Shiro takes a bit more time to reply and Lance wonders what he’s doing. He curls his fingers around himself, closing his eyes and thinking of Shiro in bed much like himself, his cock dripping and heavy between his prosthetic fingers… His phone buzzes and pulls him out of his thoughts. 

_ ‘Can I call you?’  _ Lance swallows anxiously but instead of texting him back he calls him first. He puts it on speaker because, hey, he lives by himself and his neighbors are either gone for the day already or sleep like rocks. Shiro answers as Lance sets the phone beside him on his pillow and now he can focus fully on himself, edging his shorts further down until they bunch up at mid thigh. 

“Good morning,” Shiro says. Lance immediately picks up on the rough edge in his voice. He hears Shiro move, breathing softly into the speaker. Lance purrs softly and draws soft circles around the points of his hips, aching at how sensitive his skin feels. 

“Mornin’. Sorry I surprised you so early,” he says. Shiro shushes him lightly, and Lance hears how hard he’s breathing. 

“Don’t be. I-I’m really interested,” a pause, as Shiro thinks and Lance teases one hand in, dragging the tips of his fingers up his ridge and pulling a low whine from himself. Shiro must hear it; his sigh comes clear through the speaker. “Can you tell me what you’re doing to yourself?” Shiro asks. 

“Uhm…” Lance curls his fingers around himself, drawing in a shaking breath. How does he do this? Of course, he could just be blunt and saying he’s touching himself because  _ he is  _ but that’s not sexy. “I couldn’t see you in my dream,” Lance starts. Right, from the beginning. “You were behind me, big spoon, you know- hah…” he pauses and closes his eyes as he drags his hand up to the dripping head of his cock. 

“Mhm? What was I doing?” Shiro asks. His voice has a thick quality to it that seems to cover Lance. He wants nothing more than to just listen to it all day. 

“Touching me,” Lance admits. He’s blushing embarrassingly hard; he can feel it in his cheeks. The only good side of doing this over the phone is that Shiro doesn’t get to see how bad he probably looks. “Like, my chest and uh..” his mind trails off as he circles his fingers around his slit, smearing precome back down the shaft. 

“Your cock?” Shiro finishes for him. Lance gasps at the sound of such a dirty word coming from Shiro’s lips. It’s rare; Shiro doesn’t curse often because he’s always the perfect a model of well put together sweetness that just hearing it through the phone makes heat well up in Lance’s belly, spreading under his skin until he  _ burns _ . Lance nods, remembers Shiro can’t see him.

“Yeah,” he croaks. Shiro breathes thick into the phone and Lance hears is chair creak as he moves. 

“Little jealous of myself,” Shiro admits and Lance goes quiet as he talks. He still teases himself, working the length of his arousal and using his other hand to cup and gently knead his balls. “I wish I could be there. You wouldn’t have to take care of yourself like this,” Lance chews his lip as Shiro’s voice drops to an almost growl. “I’d do it for you in a heartbeat. Use my mouth and hands on you until you’re a squirming mess under me-” Shiro cuts himself off, panting and Lance realizes all at once that Shiro’s touching himself too. He hadn’t  _ quite  _ thought about it before, not like it was seriously happening but now he knows for sure that he’s listening to Shiro pleasure himself. He licks his lips, tries his best to swallow a whine, his own hand working over himself a little faster. 

“Want you-”

“Want you too, baby,” Shiro growls. Lance shudders at the pet name, something in his chest warming in satisfaction. “Did you have to wait on me this morning?” Lance whines quietly and thinks of his shorts drawn tight over the bulge of his cock. 

“Not long,” Lance admits. Shiro hums lowly and if Lance really listens he can hear a soft, slick sound under both their panting. “Shiro, I,” he chews his lip, thinking of something sexy to say. Shiro’s already proven he’s better at this. “I always think about you,” he admits, and that pulls a low groan from Shiro.

“Me too,” Shiro answers.Lance squeezes himself, gasps in pleasure and he watches as a bead of precome wells up at his slit and drips onto his belly. “Thought about sleeping with you again. Thought about you coming up here. Thought about what I’d do to you when we meet each other again,” Shiro says. Lance pants hard and loosens his grip on himself, slowly milking his cock root to tip, his stomach quickly growing to a slick mess. Lance opens his mouth, hesitating to continue that line of thought. 

“What would you do to me?” he asks. There’s a pause where they both of them just breathe hard, but Shiro makes a low, hungry sound that makes Lance’s cock twitch. 

“I’d fuck you again,” Shiro admits. Lance hitches, squeezing his thighs together. “Open you up with my fingers until you begged for more,” Lance closes his eyes, thinks back to that night in the hotel room. Shiro sinking three fingers into him so deep he was sure he couldn’t physically take anymore. How good it was. So good. That sweet burn that swallowed him until there was nothing left but the two of them together. That gets to him and finally his high starts to grow, his belly flexing as he nears his high.

“I’d make you ride my cock. You’d look so pretty over me and-” Lance doesn’t hear the rest of what Shiro tells him. He comes all at once with a high, thin whine. His hips jump off the bed, his hand working himself firm and quick and milking himself out, painting his skin in pearly lines of come. 

It leaves him dazed and he hardly knows how many seconds have passed when he manages to blink the stars out of his vision. He stares at the ceiling and listens to Shiro over the speaker. The older man’s breath catches and he makes a long, low growl that ends in a heavy gasp. For several seconds they listen to each other trying to catch their breath. Shiro speaks up first. 

“I got a little carried away,” he says. Lance shakes his head and reaches for the box of tissues he keeps on the nightstand while trying not jostle the phone too much. 

“No, I,” Lance sighs and starts to clean himself up. “I really liked it. I was pretty desperate when I texted you this morning,” he admits. Shiro hums in agreement. 

“I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately,” Shiro says a little quieter. Lance pauses in the middle of throwing the soiled tissues away. 

“Did you mean that stuff you said at the end?” Lance asks. He tosses the tissues in the small trash can he keeps nearby. Shiro laughs softly while Lance lifts his hips and pulls his shorts back up. 

“Yeah, I did. I… my fantasies have been pretty specific lately,” Shiro says. Lance fights between feeling shy at being thought of so explicitly and being flattered. Lance curls up on his side and faces the phone laying on the pillow beside him. 

“Sounds like fun,” he hums. Shiro huffs, amused. Another pauses on Shiro’s end. 

“Lance? I’m going to be out tonight, but what are you tomorrow evening?” he asks. He sounds a little different, a little less sure of himself.  Lance hums as he thinks. 

“Nothing, really. I close shop at five and after that I’m free. Why?” 

“Do you wanna watch a movie with me?”


	6. Official

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is super gross and I love it. 
> 
> Me, today, realizing I have another longfic planned out to write for November. (Galra and Werewolves if y'all are interested.) So tomorrow I'm going to start working on it for actual realness instead of doing Saltwater all the time. I'll try really hard to keep this fic up and running at the same pace (because frankly i'm a little obsessed with writing Saltwater right now i'm so EXCITED) but once I have both of these longfics going at the same time I can't totally promise that. But before the 1st I'll try to have a couple more chapters of this out. There's only a few left before that angst I talked about a ways back kicks in and we really start talking about what happened to Shiro in the past (Yes, I try to write him a little more shy and nervous than canon on purpose I promise) so I hope you guys have your seatbelts ready~

It was Lance’s idea that they watch 2001: A Space Odyssey. Shiro had told him to pick the movie and he would just get a copy of his own before they met tonight. So he had spent the afternoon digging through whatever Netflix was streaming. If he were choosing a movie for literally anyone else, he would have listed off one of the Lord of the Rings movies without a second thought. He’s only watched those like five hundred times, but that shit never gets old! But this was Shiro and while he was pretty sure the guy would have said yes and suffered through it for him, that wasn’t really a point of a date. 

Yeah, okay, 2001 was nearing a hundred years old but everyone who watched it (Hunk, his mom, Papa, etc..) still said it was a good movie. And it looked like something Shiro would be really into. He hoped. Maybe he had watched it already. Maybe he didn’t like it? Shit. 

The morning before they were supposed to meet up again Lance texted the suggestion to Shiro, who had seemed a little dubious.

_ ‘Are you picking it just for me?’  _ Shiro had said. Lance paled as he replied. Busted, but it wasn’t like he was being really sneaky about it either. 

_ ‘Kind of. I looked through my list of movies I wanted to watch and picked out something I thought you would like.’  _ Lies. Lance didn’t have a “to watch” list. All he watched was Lord of the Rings and sappy romances.

_‘I was expecting you to pick something newer,”_ Shiro wrote, and then quickly after;   
_‘Not that I’m complaining.’_ __  
_‘ I have an old bluray of it I haven’t watched in awhile.’_  
__‘8?’ Lance had breathed a sigh of relief reading the string of texts. 

_ ‘8 <3’  _ Lance flushes dark sending that one. He’s such a sap he can’t stand himself. 

The three hours between closing the shop for the day and eight o’clock seem to drag on for eternity. It’s not like it’s the first time he’s talked to Shiro on skype; they had probably talked for hours over it but it had always been casual and unassuming. They had never planned anything beyond a time to show up. Nothing of what to talk about, nothing that went beyond anything Lance would talk about with any other friend. But yesterday morning… Lance shivers. The things Shiro said! In retrospect, calling him instead of continuing to text had been a good thing; Lance hadn’t been forced to choose between deleting some raunchy texts (though he had had to delete those pictures he’d taken already) and never being able to talk to Shiro with a straight face again lest he scroll past them. Thinking about it still got him bad enough without him having to constantly go over them every time he talked to Shiro. 

The point was that their relationship had shifted a little after that. It had gone back somewhat to the way that Lance felt when Shiro was still here on vacation and would walk into his shop showing off so much skin. Like when Lance had had the worst kind of crush on him. Only a little bit more. A little more solid. Their conversations felt less like they were trying to impress each other (although Lance definitely still felt that way, but he felt that way with a lot of people) and more like they were really, truly sure that their feelings were mutual. 

Lance squints into the microwave at the spinning bag of popcorn. He thinks that stuff, about them feeling mutual but that doesn’t stop him from acting half crazy every time they plan to meet up. He’s already cleaned his house, and the movie has been paused on the opening credits on his laptop for the past hour. He hasn’t “dressed up” like he had the first few times they talked but he’s opted for the kind of shorts that he would wear to work rather than the short ones he liked to sleep and lay around the house in. 

Shiro ends up calling him five minutes early and Lance has to scramble to finish fluffing up the pillows on his bed just so before he answers. Shiro looks like he’s moved to the futon Lance usually sees in the background of their calls because he’s more reclined and the camera is turned up more towards him. That, and Yuri’s ear creeps into frame where she’s settled her head in Shiro’s lap. Lance waves. 

“Hi, did you have a good day?” Lance asks. Maybe it’s the difference in the camera angle or the second light source coming, presumably, from the movie set up on Shiro’s desk, but the older man looks tired. Shiro makes an assenting sound though. 

“Yeah, good enough. It’s maybe 10 degrees colder today than it has been since I got back,” he says. Lance’s brow furrows, wondering why that means anything. “My arm is sore.” Lance feels a little bad for forgetting that he’s got a prosthetic arm. He frowns lightly. 

“You okay?” he asks. Shiro looks a little surprised and chuckles softly. 

“I’m fine. Sorry for calling and then complaining first thing. It wouldn’t bother me if I hadn’t been working outside today. And I just got back from walking her,” he says, playing gently with Yuri’s ear. Lance hears the dog grunt softly. “I’ll be fine once I warm up some. How are you?”

“Business always slows down starting in September so I’m about to start asking around the hotels for some off season money,” Lance answers. “I was pretty jittery about meeting with you tonight.” Shiro huffs.

“How come? We talk all the time,” he says. Shiro glances to something beside him off screen and wonders if he imagines the pink in his cheeks. “It’s not a ehm... a big deal or anything.” 

“I’ve never had someone cute ask me to watch a movie with them, skype or not. Usually I just do this kind of stuff with my family, or Hunk,” Lance shifts, playing with the edge of his blanket. “It feels like a date or something.” Shiro clears his throat and now Lance is  _ sure  _ he’s blushing. 

“I got something for you while I was out earlier,” Shiro says. He stares off screen again, grinding his teeth. “I know I can’t actually  _ give  _ it to you, but… promise not to laugh?” Lance nods. 

“I won’t laugh,” Lance says, but Shiro still hesitates for a second before he reaches for what he’s looking for. 

“It’s pretty stupid,” Shiro says as he brings a red rose into frame. He looks nervous and Lance sees the flower shivering in his grip as his hands shake. Shiro loses nerve and sets it aside again. 

“Shiro!” Lance gripes. “Come on, I wanna see it.” His fingers twitch; he wants to cover his face from his nerves. “Thank you,” he says. He feels anxious and a little high. No one had ever done something so sweet for him before. Nothing so simple but well meaning as getting him a flower. “I love it.” Shiro’s expression opens up with a wide smile. Fingers still shaking, he brings the rose back into frame and sets it behind himself along the top edge of the futon where Lance can see it.

“I’m glad you like it. I was really nervous you would laugh at me, or think it’s stupid I mean…” Shiro sighs, shakes his mind clear. “This is pretty much the only way we talk.” Lance hums in agreement, pulling up his knees and resting his chin on them. 

“But it’s the only way we can talk,” Lance reminds him. “I’m kind of jealous that I can’t actually have it. And I’m sorry I didn’t think to get you anything.” Shiro shakes his head quickly.

“No, don’t be. It was a whim and I meant it as a surprise. I’m not expecting anything,” he lets out a deep breath and sinks into the futon. Yuri’s collar clicks as she rolls over and Shiro rubs her chest. “I love 2001, you ready to watch it?” Lance switches tabs over to the movie he has paused. 

“Yeah, I heard it was pretty wild.”

Lance doesn’t think he blinks through the last fifteen minutes of the film. He stares at the screen, hardly processing the images, the psychedelic colors. A long pause hangs between them as the credits roll. Lance doesn’t think to click back to the skype call until Shiro speaks up.

“You look a little scared,” Shiro says, amusement in his voice. Lance opens his mouth, closes it again, blinks and shakes his head lightly. 

“I am! What just happened?” Lance asks. The wormhole thing, the weird room, the aging, the kid floating above Earth? He must look as confused as he feels because Shiro laughs when Lance brings their call back up. “I heard it was crazy at the end but I don’t think I got even a part of that.”

“Dave became the Star Child!” Shiro says. Like that explains anything!

“A Star Child?,” Lance laces his fingers in front of himself, thinking hard. “Okay. Riddle me this, genius. Did Dave meet aliens or was that something just crazy?” Shiro shrugs. 

“I think he did. They changed him, didn’t he? I always thought of them of those kinds of aliens where they’re just like,” Shiro motions vaguely. “A thought cloud or something.” 

“Oh my God, Shiro, I’m gonna have nightmares,” Lance says. HIs popcorn has gone nearly completely forgotten the entire time. Shiro laughs again. 

“You can talk to me if you can’t sleep. I promise I won’t mind,” Shiro hums. “It’s a pretty weird movie. There’s a book of it. By Arthur C. Clarke. It goes into a little more detail about what’s actually going on, but I don’t think the two are strictly meant to go with each other…” Shiro pauses in his little speech. “Did you like it? I didn’t make you sit through a weird movie, did I?”

“No, I definitely liked it. I just think I might have to watch it again to make sense of it. I liked watching it with you,” Lance says. “It was a good date.” Shiro scoffs. 

“You found me out, even though I didn’t try to say it specifically,” Shiro says. They both go quiet for a couple of seconds, Lance picking up on the feeling that Shiro was considering something. 

“If this went well,” Shiro says, looking at the screen but not quite looking Lance in the eye. “I wanted to ask you something important.” Lance lifts a brow.

“Important? What’s that?” He asks. Shiro pauses again, and Lance watches the slow rise of his chest when he takes a slow, deep breath.

“Okay Lance. Don’t… Don’t think that you have to say yes. I don’t want to make you feel pressured and if you have to think that’s totally cool. If you wanna think and just never get back to me on it that’s also fine. I’m not gonna harass you for an answer…” Shiro never manages to look him straight in the eye as he rambles on. He looks more like he’s saying all of this to Yuri where she’s sleeping in his lap. 

“Shiro.”

“And if you say no, that’s also really, totally fine. Please don’t be scared to tell me no. I get it, and I can think of a hundred reasons why you would say that and..” Lance pouts.

“Shiro!” Shiro cuts himself off, glancing up a Lance and away again. It was strange to see him so worked up and nervous. What was eating at him?

“I can’t tell you yes or no unless you ask me,” Lance says, biting back a smile at how antsy Shiro looks. “What is it?” Shiro visibly builds up his nerve.

“Do you want to… maybe… make this, this stuff, that’s between us more official? I know it’s long distance but, I don’t have anyone else-” Shiro heaves an almost angry sigh. “No, it’s not that. I don’t  _ want  _ anyone else but you, Lance. I think about you all the time. There’s  _ thousands  _ of people here in Cleveland but I’m not interested in any of them. I’m just interested in  _ you.  _ You make me really, really happy and even though I know we can’t physically be together like a normal…couple. I still want to be able to call you a boyfriend.”

Lance hides his face in his hands. Shiro just asked him out. How does he answer. How does he answer? Of course, the first answer that pops into his  _ yes, like forever yes he’s always wanted a boyfriend and why would he ever turn down the hottest guy to even look at him for more than two fucking seconds.  _ The long distance thing sucked but…they had made it work yesterday morning, right? They had schedules that let them meet pretty regularly. They got along well. Even a month down the road Lance still got butterflies in his chest whenever Shiro would do this or that or whatever. He was super interested in Shiro’s life and Shiro always seemed interested in his. They had  _ chemistry  _ that Lance had never felt before and he was always truly, truly happy to have Shiro as a friend. 

“Lance, uh,” Shiro speaks up nervously. “You don’t have to answer right now. Or ever. I’m sor-” Lance lightly brushes his webcam with his fingers to shut him up. 

“I’ll only get mad if you apologize, Shiro. Really mad. I’m having a moment,” he huffs behind his other hand. Shit, he’s going to get emotional and start crying if he’s not really careful right now. “A good moment, okay? Just be patient.” He covers his face again because he knows that if he even looks at Shiro in the next few seconds he’ll turn into a gross mess. One deep breath, two and three, and his heart feels like it’s in a more appropriate place in his chest. When he looks up again, Shiro’s chewing his lip and rubbing Yuri’s ear between his fingers. 

“Okay. I mean, yes. Sure,” Lance bites his tongue, tries to get his words into order. “I want us to be a thing. Jesus, you almost gave me some kind of conniption there. I wasn’t expecting that.” So much tension seems to melt out of Shiro’s shoulders, smiling wide. 

“You mean it?” he asks. 

“You asked me! I hope you mean it,” Lance blows Shiro a kiss and watches the older man’s blush grow. “Don’t worry. I’ll find a way to be a handful even if we’re long distance.”


	7. Confidant

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've never written a scene of any length with Hunk and Lance before and I've decided I love it. 
> 
> In case it's not readily apparent in this chapter and also because I like forcing you guys to read my headcanons here's how I'm handling Pidge. Since this is an AU where Matt and Sam Holt never went to Kerberos and were never captured, Katie Holt has no real reason to alter her persona to Pidge. So when I'm writing her in this fic, I'm writing and imagining her as Katie, a 16 year old girl, so she might come across as more girly and less strictly serious/secretive than I would write her if she were acting as Pidge. (She's still adorable and a nerd and definitely Shiro's favorite little sister.) If that makes any sense. 
> 
> Why do I still call her Pidge then? Strategically, because that's how like 95% of the fandom refers to her and it's easier to keep with that. Within the fic, I was imagining that Pidge would be a nickname that her family/Shiro would use for her. She'll happily go by either name. Keith is going to show up later and it's a toss up on if I want him to refer to her as Katie or Pidge.

When Lance comes into the shop the next morning he keeps the doors pushed wide open. There’s not as much of a point to it when it’s creeping towards October and the crowds are dwindling, but  Lance hasn’t thought the weather felt so good in weeks. It never gets that cold in a place like Cuba, but Lance can start to feel that little bite in the air when summer really comes to an end. Normally it’s a time of year he doesn’t really look forward to because he has less of an excuse to spend all his time at the beach and more and more he’ll spend his time cooped up indoors working part time in a hotel somewhere and missing the thicker crowds of summer. Normally, he would have dreaded the fact that he had to wear jeans in, but right now he doubts today could be anything less than stellar. 

He had a boyfriend, and it feels like his life has taken on some kind of depth to it that he didn’t have before. It’s a feeling that’s a little hard to describe or make sense of, which he already has because he’s got this sneaking suspicion that somehow he shouldn’t be  _ this  _ pleased with himself over just having a boyfriend. Hell, people in secondary school would go through them on a weekly basis and just move on like nothing had happened. And it does feel a little weird when he forces himself to think about it all objectively. 

They didn’t actually  _ do  _ anything besides come to a mutual decision to be “a thing”. In fact, the long distance stuff made it pretty hard to do anything physically meaningful. But right now he had a person. Someone all his own, and it didn’t go down in the way that Lance had always imagined. He had always thought his own romantic life, whenever it did eventually decide to manifest, would have been through a lot of very deliberate and well thought out effort on his own part. He had always fantasized himself finding someone cute and wooing them with his wit and romantic charms, taking them on on dates and finally, finally, he would whittle them down and their bond would be unbreakable. 

It hadn’t been like that at all with Shiro. When he thinks about it, every significant effort Lance had made had been on impulse and, well, his raging libido. Anything else and he was a self-conscious mess just trying to be interesting enough for Shiro to keep bothering to talk to him. Which felt like a lot, because how would a nobody like himself keep the interest of a guy who worked for freaking  _ NASA  _ every day? He hadn’t even considered some of the stuff Shiro had told him last night as things that could even realistically happen. He’d never realized he made Shiro so happy, he’d never thought about himself as anything that could be so important in someone else’s life, it never occurred to him that he would linger in Shiro’s mind like Shiro always seemed to hang around in his own. 

But he _had,_ apparently, and Lance hadn’t even gotten a chance to be desperate enough to try begging him to stick around. Shiro had come and asked him out on his own before Lance could even really develop a serious fantasy about it. That was the most flattering, that someone as sweet and smart and handsome and amazing as Shiro had come and asked him out first and-

“You look like you just sold the store for a couple million,” Lance jerks out of his thoughts with a rather unflattering squawk. Hunk was already setting his morning shopping on the smoothie counter and measuring Lance with a hard stare. “What’s got you so dreamy looking? Please tell me we’re rich. I’ve always wanted to retire early,” he says. Lance rolls his eyes. 

“No one would take this store for fifty bucks, much less make us millionaires,” Lance walks over to Hunk and paws through the bags. He pulls out a sack of pears to start peeling them. “I just had a good night last night, that’s all.” Hunk’s suspicion shifts to mild concern.

“Uh, safely?” Hunk asks.

‘ _ Yes, of course, but about a month too late, _ ’ Lance thinks to himself, as he pulls a small knife out of the block and starts shaving the bright green peel off the first pear. “Not like that, Hunk,” he says. 

“Should have known,” Hunk says quietly. Lance lowers the pear but not his paring knife. 

“You wanna dial back the sass while I’ve got this thing?” Lance threatens gently. Hunk doesn’t even bother to look at him as he chops the top off a pineapple with a much larger knife. Lance continues on. “If you want to know the  _ gruesome  _ details-” 

“I don’t.”

“We just watched a movie and it was weird as hell-” 

“Alright, I guess I’ll hear it anyways-”

“But he asked me out and now I have a boyfriend.” Hunk sets both his hands on the counter and stares out the open front doors to the beach. 

“What?”

“A boyfriend, Hunk. Don’t tell me you’re surprised that I’m bi, because I came out to you like four years ago and I’ve been trying really hard  _ not  _ to hide it.” Lance says. Hunk shakes his head and goes back to peeling the pineapple. 

“I know that, I’m just surprised that you’re suddenly dating,” he says. Lance growls.

“I never put the knife down, buddy-” Lance says. 

“No, not that I think you can’t get one,” Hunk glances at him out of the corner of his eye. “Though I was starting to wonder. I thought you’d have him in here all the time, but I haven’t even heard about you flirting with anyone.” Lance very pointedly goes back to his pear. 

“Well, he’s not around here,” Lance says.

“Uh oh. Where is he?” Hunk replies. “You didn’t fall in love with a prisoner, did you?”

“ _ No _ . He’s in Cleveland and I’ll have you know he works a very fancy job with NASA,” Lance says, biting the tip of his tongue as he focuses on shaving off as little flesh of the fruit as he can.

“What the hell are you doing with a guy in Cleveland? Who is this? How did you meet him?” Hunk’s voice takes on an edge of concern but he doesn’t stop what he’s working on, cutting thick slices of the pineapple. 

“Remember Shiro? From this summer?” Hunk goes quiet for several seconds as he thinks back before Lance offers more. “Lots of scars, a prosthetic arm?” Hunk remembers immediately then. 

“That guy? I didn’t realize you kept talking to him. You didn’t think it was weird that he came in here pretty much every single day just to oggle you?” Hunk asks. Lance had never realized that was even happening, much less that Hunk would pick up on it. “I was worried I’d have to start working security for you but now he’s your boyfriend.” Lance puffs up his chest a little. 

“He’s not  _ weird  _ Hunk, he’s really sweet and he’s got a cute dog and he’s super smart and-” Hunk silences him with a hard stare. 

“I’m not saying he’s not,” Hunk says and Lance can feel one of Hunk’s grumpy rants coming on. “But the guy is also a really, really long ways away and you can’t exactly just roll up and double check his sources.” Lance huffs.

“He wouldn’t-” Hunk just talks over him before he can get started. 

“Listen to me. If he’s nice, and he makes you happy, I’m not going to fight you on it. It’s not my business. But don’t let yourself get so attached to this guy that you can’t let him go, okay? That long distance stuff is really hard and if you’re not happy with him anymore... “ Hunk’s stare softens. “Make sure he’s treats you well. Don’t let him hurt you. If I find out he hurt you, he’ll get some kind of hell from me. You won’t have to worry about that.” 

Lance gets where Hunk is coming from, he really does, but he still lets his head fall back in a dramatic show of exhaustion. Long distance or not, he’s pretty sure Hunk would have given him a speech like this no matter who he’d decided to date. 

“I promise I’ll keep a close eye on him,” Lance says. 

“He’s not allowed to boss you around,” Hunk pushes.

“He’s not allowed to boss me around,” Lance repeats. “Come on, he asked me out last night. He hasn’t even had a chance to try anything yet. Give him a chance.” Hunk makes a noncommittal sound. 

“If you’re sure about him. I hope he makes you happy,” Hunk says, then points to the half forgotten pear in Lance’s hand. “Now help me finish this.”

* * *

 

Shiro knows that fifteen miles out of town is pretty good when it comes to avoiding light pollution, but he usually will go thirty if he’s really itching for a good viewing. When Pidge asks to come along on one of the rare nights that neither of them has anything to do in the next morning besides sleep in, they’ll pack dinner along with all their equipment and make a night out of it. 

Forty miles out of town there’s a park they like to visit that’s big enough for them to hike a ways in and let what few lights there are be blocked out by a line of trees. So it’s only the two of them (three, if they count Yuri snuffling around in the trees within reach of her retractable leash) in the little clearing. Shiro sets up his telescope as close to the center as he can to avoid the tops of the trees behind them while Pidge bundles up with his coat in the grass not far off, squinting into the star charts on her laptop. 

“Is Jupiter pretty good tonight?” Shiro asks. He bends over his telescope and ignores the slight pinch in the small of his back. When Pidge tags along, he always sets the legs a bit lower than he usually likes to keep them when he’s on his own so she can easily reach the lens. He changes the angles in tiny increments in search of the planet as Pidge taps away at her keyboard. 

“Supposed to, but it might be behind the trees still,” she replies after several seconds of silence. Shiro hums and changes his focus to some of the brighter stars instead. He has enough time to look around and check through several of the stars in Cygnus before he realizes Pidge has gone almost completely quiet. 

“Pidge? You okay back there?” he asks. He tips the telescope again, focuses in on Deneb, but Pidge never speaks up. “Katie?” He straightens up and when he faces Pidge, he finds she’s watching him closely, brow furrowed. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m thinking,” Shiro lets out a soft breath and wanders closer. “I’m wondering how to bring it up.”

“Oh no. What does that mean?” Shiro frowns deeply, worry spiking in his chest. In the few years he’s known her, Pidge had become something of a little sister or a favorite niece to him, so as he lowers himself into the grass next to her, all sorts of scenarios are flitting through his mind all at once. Is someone giving her trouble at school? Boys? Something more sinister? Is it something she can’t talk about with her family? “Can I help? You know anything you tell me is in total confide-” Pidge flaps her hand at him. 

“First, put that dad business away. It’s a little weird,” she says. “It’s not me it’s  _ you, _ ” Shiro’s brow raises in surprise, that spike of anxiety thawing out somewhat. 

“Me?” Shiro asks. 

“Yeah, like, I don’t know. You’ve been acting different ever since you got back from Cuba, but I can’t figure out why,” she says. Oh, Shiro knows exactly what she means, but he hadn’t realized it was that noticeable. Pidge was undoubtedly very perceptive, and it wasn’t like he’d been making a conscious effort to keep acting depressed after he’d gotten back, after he’d met Lance. He hadn’t thought it would bother anyone. 

“I have? How so?” he feigns ignorance, just to see what she’ll come up with. Because it’s hard to for someone to form an accurate before and after profile on themselves. Pidge doesn’t answer immediately and he can almost see the cogs working behind her eyes as she tries to come up with a good description. Finally, she just shrugs. 

“I don’t know. Like you’re more relaxed? Happier? I feel kind of bad for being so bothered by it.” Shiro laughs. 

“You think it’s weird that I’m happier?” he teases. Pidge groans. 

“ _ No.  _ It’s good. I just can’t keep myself from being curious,” she says. Shiro recognizes her tone as  _ don’t answer if you don’t want to.  _ “You always seemed really serious and quiet before you left but now…” 

“I’m not? I get it,” Shiro stretches out on his back and feels the short, cool grass tickling the back of his neck. “Lately I’ve been feeling more like myself. Before I moved up here. So maybe I’m closer to normal than I have been in awhile.” Pidge glances at him, opens her mouth like she’s going to say something but turns back to the charts on her screen. Shiro frowns at her reaction. How he’s been handling everything; the new arm, the scars, all the little things that suddenly make him anxious...It’s not something he talks about often. 

Not to Sam, definitely, because he’s his boss and it rubs him just a little bit the wrong way to have his superior, as good of a friend as he is, know the intricacies of his declining mood in the years after the crash. Certainly not to Lance; he didn’t need to know about that rough side of him. Not yet. Keith was a fellow pilot; he’d probably understand better than anyone, but Shiro had always held back with him for fear of clouding up his instincts. Shiro had always been scared of causing him to hesitate at a crucial moment with his horror stories.

He’d only come to talk about it with Matt relatively openly in the past year or so as they grew be close friends. Matt had offered him a lot of help when things started eating at him. He had been the one to suggest that Shiro take some leave and go somewhere to unwind for awhile. He supposed it was Matt’s fault he’d even met Lance in the first place. 

Shiro had never gone out of his way to really hide anything from Pidge, but he had only rarely talked about himself explicitly in front of her. She had been just shy of 13 when he’d moved here three years ago. She’d had to have been exceptionally imperceptive not to pick up on his physical scars but only recently had he come to know she knew more about his emotional ones than he thought as well. She would do little things that showed when she picked up on his changing moods, his growing depression just before he’d left for Cuba, but tonight had been the first time she’d brought the subject up. 

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable,” Shiro says. Pidge shakes her head and turns back to him.

“I didn’t expect you to want to talk about it,” she says. “You really do feel better?” she asks. Shiro thinks she sounds somewhat hopeful. 

“Yeah, I do. It was a good trip,” Shiro says. He looks up at the speckled sky for several seconds, listening to the crickets, the soft clinking of Yuri’s dog tags a short ways off. He thinks about Lance, how he’d teared up and covered his face, all flushed cheeks and wide smiles when Shiro had asked him out. How Shiro’s heart had felt like it was going to jump up his throat when he’d actually asked and how easily it had settled down again when Lance told him yes. Right now, several days later, he’s still brimming with energy in a way he hasn’t felt in years. He just wanted to tell someone, anyone, everyone how much Lance meant to him. “Pidge? Is it okay if I tell you something personal? Will it bother you?” he says, glancing back at Pidge. 

“I don’t mind. I already know you’re gay, so I think I’d only be bugged out if you murdered someone,” Pidge says. Shiro hums, a little caught off guard. He hadn’t realized Pidge had also picked up on his sexuality, but he supposes now that was one less thing to worry about.

“It has to be a secret,” Shiro presses. “From Matt specifically, but I’d rather you not tell anyone.” Pidge closes her laptop and turns her full attention to him despite both of them being nearly engulfed in darkness. 

“Not one person. I promise,” she says. Shiro sighs, lacing his fingers over his stomach. 

“I met someone down there,” he admits. Pidge nearly flings herself onto her stomach beside him. 

“Holy shit you have a boyfriend,” she breathes, awed. Shiro laughs louder than he means to. Pidge huffs softly. “Come on.” 

“Sorry. Just how you said that was funny,” Shiro says, settling down again. “But yeah, I met him when I went to Cuba, and I kept talking with him, and a few days ago I asked him out.” Pidge pats the ground excitedly. 

“Is he cute?” she asks. “What’s his name? Do you have a picture? Show me.” Shiro lifts his hips to pull his phone out of his back pocket. 

“His name is Lance, and yeah, I think he’s pretty cute,” Shiro says, he pulls up a picture Lance took of himself in the shop, smiling against the backdrop of brightly colored surfboards. Pidge coos when he shows it to her. 


	8. Cat Sitting

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This entire chapter came about from some massively cute and wonderful headcanons Janna shared with me in the comments. Thank you for letting me write it. I hope I did your idea some kind of justice. 
> 
> So, this is the last chapter where I'm solely working on Saltwater before I start posting a rewrite of another longfic in a couple of days. I'll to try to keep this story going at a good clip, but I can't promise. I'm not going to just drop it, but it'll probably be one update a week instead of the close to two I've been putting out so far. 
> 
> That said, of COURSE this has to happen just as I'm moving the plot along. There's actually more to this fic than the constant skyping! Oh my god! But! I have a conundrum and I want some opinions on what the next chapter's going to be. Two options:
> 
> 1\. Smut. (Had like a lingerie/skype date thing in mind)  
> 2\. Angst/Actually Moving the Plot along. 
> 
> Basically I'm asking if you guys want ooone more chapter of smut before the plot things or if you want the plot now. I'll probably still write the smut, I'll just post it separately (because this fic has a growing list of side items that don't really fit in neatly but I still want to add to this AU) and it'll probably be Awhile before I get around to it.

Lance was supposed to meet him at six sharp. Shiro frowns, glancing at the time in the corner of his monitor. It’s nearly twenty after and Shiro’s already called twice without any luck. It’s strange for Lance. They’ve been meeting up more often in the past couple of weeks since they started dating and they both had a tendency to show up early. Lance had never been late to a call without some kind of explanation. 

Shiro leans back in his chair and turns on his phone. He scrolls through his most recent texts with Lance, in case he had missed something. He doesn’t see anything. There’s the text where Lance asks to meet Saturday at six, now. The only thing after that is a selfie of Lance on the boardwalk, framed by bright blue sky and palm trunks, brightly colored umbrellas dotting the sand behind him. He brings up the keyboard, puts it away again. He’ll call one more time and then send a text asking if he’d misunderstood their plans. 

He sets his phone aside and calls Lance again, his nervous energy pulling tight at his shoulders. It rings, twice, three times…

It picks up with a loud clatter and Shiro flinches back in surprise. He blinks at the screen and sees...a cat’s foot? 

“Bruja!” Lance growls. He hears the cat meow innocently, then it leaves view in a flash of sleek black and white fur. Lance calls after it as he chases the animal, their steps thudding all around Lance’s little one room apartment. He hears the cat’s bell tinkling along with Lance’s muttered irritation. 

It occurs to Shiro relatively quickly, when his belly gives a slight warm turn, that he’s never heard Lance speak in Spanish at length. He has only a passing knowledge of the language. He picks up Lance calling the cat a ‘little witch’ and ‘a dirty hairball’ but for the most part it goes over his head. But Lance’s voice is gorgeous around the words and it makes something as mundane as scolding a cat send a warm shiver through him. 

The cat’s bell rings somewhere behind Lance’s computer where Shiro can barely hear it and he sees Lance’s heel come into frame. He stands there chatting at the animal with impatiently for several seconds before he shifts. The view jerks suddenly when Lance picks up the laptop. Lance keeps ranting for several seconds as he sets the computer back on the table. Then he glances at the screen and all the ire drops out of his expression at once. 

“Oh! How did it answer?” Lance asks. The cat meows off screen and Lance glares at it. “I didn’t ask you, squeaky, be quiet.” Another meow. 

“I think it picked up when your laptop fell over,” Shiro says. He bites his lip, trying his best to hide his smile over Lance’s pouting. “I’ve been looking at the floor for a couple minutes now.” Lance sighs thickly. 

“I’m sorry about that. Being late and all,” Lance says. The cat’s bell rings closer and Lance glances down in the floor, following the animal as it circles his chair before turning his attention back to Shiro. “I’m babysitting Chiquita for a few days and she’s been raising hell since she came over.” 

“I was wondering when you got a cat,” Shiro says. 

“She’s the neighbor’s. They went to visit their parents and needed someone to watch their kid while they were gone so,” Lance shrugs. “It’s worth a few bucks to have a wild animal getting hair on all my furniture.” Shiro chuckles.

“Do you not like pets normally?” he asks. Something thumps on the table. Shiro hears it pattering around, tinkling softly as Lance narrows his eyes. 

“Oh no, they’re cute and all. I had a few cats growing up and my brother’s even got a chinchilla, but now that I’ve got my own place, one room seems kind of small for anything bigger than a fish and I can’t keep those alive,” Lance says. The cat, Chiquita, strolls into view across the table and makes herself comfortable between Lance and his camera. She’s a tiny tuxedo colored cat, white toes and chest and mouth standing stark against silky black fur. She looks a little gangly, her feet and eyes a tiny bit too big. A cat caught between kitten and juvenile. 

“She’s cute,” Shiro says. The cat turns and looks at him, her pupils growing wide, then thin again, glowing burnished gold. “Hi, kitty,” he purrs. As typical of a cat, she loses interest as soon as Shiro acknowledges her and chatters at Lance instead, who tries to fight her off. He can’t help but laugh as Lance gently pushes at her chest, then tries to pick her up, only for her to glide away from his efforts in that boneless way only cats ever seem to manage. 

“Do you see this?” Lance huffs. He gives up when Chiquita finally manages to settle herself in his lap. She nestles into the crook of his arm, her little toes kneading at the front of his shirt. 

“She looks happy as she could be,” Shiro says. If he’s quiet he can even hear the slightest rumble of her purr and thinks she must sound like a wild motor to Lance. He feels a little jealous twinge in his chest when Lance scratches her chin with the tips of his fingers and she tips her head back to let him, her claws pulling little bits of Lance’s shirt. What he wouldn’t give to just wallow in Lance’s attention like that.

“Yeah, she’s happy enough to tear my house apart. I can’t leave anything out or she’s running her claws through it,” Lance frowns. She responds by shoving her head up under his chin and throwing most of her weight into rubbing against him. Lance lets her go on for a couple of seconds before he circles his fingers around her slim chest and gently pulls her off him. His shirt goes with her for a short bit until her claws untangle from the fabric and he sets her on the table. She squeaks pitifully and Lance gives her a sharp look. 

“I’m trying to talk to my boyfriend, Chiquita. My Boy Friend. Who I love very much,” Shiro’s heart skips. “You’re not old enough to know love. I don’t think you even know any boy cats. So go play with those toys your daddy left with you.” Chiquita licks her lips and wanders off screen with a flick of her tail. 

“I love you too,” Shiro says once Lance is less distracted. Lance’s expression changes from exasperation straight to joy and Shiro feels his whole body warm with affection. It’s been too long since he’s been able to say that openly. Without fear. It feels good to tell someone ‘I love you’ and get such a happy response, with no reservation or doubt. Lance blows him a kiss. 

“I know, tigre , I love you. You’re my handsome boyfriend and I’d love to have you here  _ tearing up my yarn,  _ Chiquita!” Lance scolds. The cat trills off screen and she must listen well enough, because Lance lets her be. “No one would have to pay me to keep you. I’d just let you stay.” Shiro laughs. 

“You’re sure about that?” Shiro asks. It doesn’t sound like a bad idea, staying with Lance for awhile. Lance had given him a tour of his tiny apartment before. He can see it easily, waking up in Lance’s bed with their limbs tangled together. The balcony door would be open and the whole apartment would smell of fresh air and bright, salty sea. He’d thought about spending lazy mornings in that room more than once, waking each other up with soft kisses. Shiro taking his time running his hands over Lance’s smooth, silky skin. He’s only gotten to touch him a couple times but he still remembers his pliant softness…. Lance pulls him out of his thoughts by clicking his tongue at the cat. 

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure,” Lance says without hesitation. “It might be a little more expensive to feed you but at least you don’t wake me up at night by sticking your foot in my mouth.” Shiro laughs. 

“She does that?” Lance nods quickly.

“Yeah! I don’t know when she sleeps. During the day she’s destroying my house and at night she’s using me like a jungle gym,” Lance huffs. Another rush of ringing off screen and Lance’s eyes track her across the room. “You wouldn’t do that to me. Otherwise, I think we might have to keep this thing long distance.”

“No I promise I won’t wake you up. You wouldn’t want me there all the time anyways. I’m too high maintenance,” Shiro says. Lance rolls his eyes. The screen wobbles a little when Chiquita jumps back on the table and pads over to Lance with a tiny squeak. Lance accepts her openly now, pulling her into his lap. Which she fights, opting instead to claw up to sit on his shoulder. Lance gives up and lets her stay. 

“That’s not true, Shiro! You’d be super low maintenance and nice decoration too,” Lance presses. The decoration comment means more to Shiro than he cares to admit. He taps his prosthetic fingers on the desk and smiles when Chiquita flicks her ear at the sound. 

“You really think that, babe?” Shiro asks. Lance nods his head and the cat decides that she wants to be in Lance’s lap now, setting her paws on his chest and easing herself into his arms. 

“Of course, I’ll prove it. How do you sleep?” Lance asks. He digs his fingers into the soft fur on Chiquita’s side, making her purr. 

“On my back?” Shiro answers. Where is this going? Lance nods as if that proves his point. 

“Knew it. You can be my pillow,” Lance says. He sits up a little more, tucking the cat against his chest where she kneads contentedly at his arm. “I only have a twin mattress. That okay?” Oh, Shiro knew this game. He hums thickly. 

“Yeah, that’s fine. Little smaller than I’m used to now but that sounds like fun. You’d probably have to sleep on top of me,” Shiro says and Lance’s eyes go smokey. 

“I wouldn’t mind that at all…”


	9. Secret

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, thank you to everyone who dropped a comment and left me a vote for what this chapter would be about. I got a lot more than I was expecting so I'm pleasantly surprised to see everyone's thoughts that was fun.
> 
> But y'all... I had a tie. For the people who suggested I combine them, I just counted that as a vote for both and I guess that's where the tie came from, but I couldn't just not count those votes for nothing. 
> 
> So, I put in my personal vote for Plot and so this is what's happening. It's plot. I'm sorry to everybody that voted for smut. I think pretty much everyone expressed interest in it, even if they didn't vote that way so omfg. But I am really itching to take this fic down the fork in the road because it was starting to feel, to me at least, that it was stagnating a little bit. 
> 
> The smut you guys voted for has officially earned a spot pretty high on my To Do List so I'll try not to make everyone wait too long for that.
> 
> This is a short chapter, I know, but I really just wanted a little more of Shiro being mean to himself and get some set up ready. I've already started in on the next one (it's got Big Things ISTG) and I'll try to have it up tomorrow because i love you guys enough to try and hurt you with angst. ;3

Maybe he shouldn’t talk to Lance today. He could tell, from the minute he got out of bed this morning, that it wasn’t going to be a good one. November had been bad to him for the past few years. A cold front had rolled in the night before and Cleveland was covered in a cold fog for most of the morning. 

Which meant he hurt. His arm hurt, his scars hurt, his back was stiff and his skin felt like it was pulled too tight over his body. Taking Yuri out for a walk before work was a study in how the weather liked to work him over every once in awhile. Making himself actually go through with his run was an act of pure stubbornness. Not taking an aspirin before he went to work was just a show of defiance. It didn’t help when he hobbled into work and Sam almost immediately asked if he was okay. Matt had only exacerbated the problem by offering to come over with dinner. 

He was twenty-five, but today he felt closer to eighty. 

By the time he’s settling down in front of his computer a few minutes before he’s supposed call Lance, he’s heavily considering just sending him a text letting him know he won’t be coming and instead just curling up in bed with Yuri and trying to take a nap before Matt shows up.

He hardly has a chance to mull it over. The computer chimes as Lance calls him first. He sighs thickly, knowing now he can’t just ignore that and tell him he’s not here.

No. What’s wrong with him? That’s a terrible attitude to have towards his boyfriend! Shiro answers feeling a little guilty and knowing he wouldn’t have thought something like that if Lance were here to actually hunt him down. 

“Hi tigre,” Lance purrs. He’s dressed in a tight fitting t-shirt and when he shifts in his chair Shiro sees he’s got some bright green yarn tangled between his fingers. He shakes it off and pushes it to the side with the metallic sound of his knitting needles clicking together. “Sorry. I was in the middle of knitting and remembered you were supposed to call.” Lance looks into the floor. “I made a mess.” 

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Shiro hums. Lance pouts a little, fiddles with one of the needles, his soft lips moving as he counts to himself. 

“Yeah, I didn’t drop any stitches coming over from the couch so it’s fine,” Lance pauses and when Shiro is quiet he leans in a little bit, a tiny wrinkle marring his brow. 

“How are you?” Shiro asks. Don’t be an asshole, he tells himself. Lance relaxes a little, but Shiro thinks he still looks a bit uneasy. 

“I’m good. No work today so I’ve just been catching up on things around the house. I had breakfast with Nana this morning. I told her about you,” Lance glances at him shyly, as if he’s unsure if Shiro would approve of that. He doesn’t mind, really, but he can all too easily imagine Lance’s grandmother, a tiny elderly lady scolding her grandson for trusting his heart to someone who couldn’t truly cherish it.

How true was that thought?

“She doesn’t think I’m some kind of madman?” Shiro asks instead. Lance shakes his head. 

“No, I showed her a picture. She thinks you’re really cute,” Lance says. But all grandmothers would say that about their grandchildren’s love interests. Best not to tell them they have shit tastes in men. “She only told me something about how long distance takes a lot of work but I don’t know, I think we have it down pretty well, right?” Lance asks. Shiro wonders about that. He’d just been considering skipping their meeting and really would have done it if Lance hadn’t called him first. 

“I think we do.” That feels like a lie, even though he knows how dedicated Lance is to keeping them in close touch. Lance hums in agreement and Shiro thinks he might have convinced Lance that he’s not feeling tired and old. 

“You alright today?” Lance asks, his voice dropping to something something a little softer. “I mean, I know we’ve only been talking for a few minutes but you seem kind of distracted.” Shiro stiffens and his mind tosses around for something to tell him. 

“Ah, well, my friend Matt is coming over for dinner in an hour or so.” Not a lie, but not the full story either. Lance pouts at the idea of their call being cut short. “Sorry, he tends to do whatever he wants and just invited himself over at work today.” 

“That’s okay,” Lance says, he heaves a sigh. Shiro wonders if he’s being dramatic or if he’s really upset. Lance is quiet long enough that Shiro nearly speaks up but Lance cuts him off. “We’ll talk while we can? Or do you have to leave early and get the house ready?”

He’s almost paranoid, trying to think of what’s going on in Lance’s mind. Is he just making conversation, or is he giving Shiro an out? Is Shiro not hiding his sour mood, his aches and anxieties, as well as he thought? Shiro had never told him about his past. Lance, surely, didn’t know the explicit details of how he lost his arm, how he gained his scars. But sometimes Lance would say or do things that made him wonder how much Lance was able to guess from him. 

“No, I don’t have to go until Matt decides to show up,” Talking to Lance is always better than being stuck with his own thoughts. Don’t be an asshole, Shiro. Force yourself to do things you know are good for yourself. Avoid the things (the thoughts, that inner voice) you now will fuck you up.  “He’s good enough to bring me take out.” Lance purrs. 

A few minutes before Matt’s supposed to show up, Shiro feels like he’s pushed through the worst of his downswing. Lance always does help. Even if it’s something as mundane as a video call. It’s easy to let himself get caught up in Lance’s cute appearance, his affection, the healthy social life he has, the joy he gets from his family. Lance pauses in the middle of showing Shiro his current knitting project. “Hey, will you do me a favor?” Shiro raises a brow. “It’s kind of a big one, and if you don’t want to, it’s fine with me. I was just thinking about talking to Nana this morning.”

“What is it?” Shiro asks. Lance puts the green and brown turtle shell aside, frowning softly. 

“Matt’s a good friend of yours, right? I mean you talk about him pretty often,” Lance says, and when Shiro nods; “Will you tell him about me? If you haven’t already? It’s just…” 

_ ‘I want to know you love me too. I feel like a secret,’  _ Shiro’s mind is more than happy to fill in. And it’s true. Lance has already told several of his friends and moved on to telling his family about Shiro. The only person Shiro has shared his relationship with is Pidge, who he’s sworn to secrecy. Lance is rights. It’s not fair if Shiro doesn’t reciprocate. It’s not fair to make Lance feel their relationship isn’t important because he won’t tell anyone about it. 

“I don’t mind telling him,” Shiro rushes out. He did. A little. There was a reason he’d asked Pidge to keep Lance a secret. “He’s pretty gung ho, if that makes any sense, but I’m sure he’ll like you.” Lance brightens immediately. 

“You will? Thank you!” Lance blows him a kiss and Shiro feels his chest warm with Lance’s excitement. “I love you. I’ll take a cute picture so you can brag about me, okay?” Shiro huffs, amused. 

“Nothing raunchy. I know how you are.” Lance just winks at him. 

“I know, that’s for later,” he says. “Okay, go have dinner. Have fun. Send me a text if you can come back later. I’m not going anywhere tonight.”


	10. It's Personal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ; -;

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So remember when I promised angst?
> 
> In case it's confusing the bolded bits are supposed to be Shiro's inner voice. As you can see he's very rude.

He’d been trying to build up his nerve all through dinner. Matt sits across the table from him, his coat thrown over the back of his chair and his sleeves rolled up past his elbows. While Matt looks totally relaxed, but Shiro’s heart feels a little too tight. He’s been flopping back and forth in his mind for the past half hour. 

Shiro could just not tell Matt anything. Lance wouldn’t know one way or the other. He could just tell him that Matt was happy to see him and he knew Lance would be beside himself. 

But that would make him a jerk. He’d be a liar and a coward and, while it would just be so much easier, it would leave a sour taste in his mouth. He would regret it, and that was a path he didn’t want to go down with Lance. He didn’t want to betray him like that. 

In the few years since he’s moved to Cleveland, Matt had, truly, become his best friend. But when he had told Lance he was gung-ho, he had meant it. Matt was one of the most passionate people he’d ever met. He threw himself into his interests, he fought tooth and nail for his family and friends. When they had first met, Shiro had expected Matt to react to him just as everyone else did. Well meaning, but not truly knowing how to deal with his arm, or his scars or the occasional mood swings and so holding him at arm’s length. 

It wasn’t like that. Matt had wanted to understand and he had wanted to help in whatever way he could. Shiro had resisted him at first, but over the months he had found that Matt and by extension the Holts, were a support group that he just couldn’t get along without. Shiro knew he could always trust Matt to give him space when he needed it, listen to his whining when his head got too full, and give him a swift kick in the ass when he was getting too down on himself. Whatever they thought would help him out the most. 

But… Shiro was honestly nervous about what Matt would think about him trying to manage a long distance relationship. 

“I’m glad you look like you warmed up,” Matt says suddenly. He looks down a Yuri, who lingers around his chair in the hopes she would get a stray piece of food. 

“The cold front killed me. I almost called in,” Shiro says. That’s the truth. Even though he had the heat cranked up in his house, he still felt a little stiff. Matt nods in understanding.

“I get it. My leg bothers me when it’s cold and all I did was fall down a flight of stairs. You’ve gotta feel like shit,” Matt says. “You seemed like you were doing really good for awhile, so when you looked so miserable this morning, I was worried.” Shiro takes a deep breath lets it out again. 

“There’s something else going on too,” Matt looks up, concern marking his features. “I met someone, this summer. I’ve been talking to them,” Shiro says. 

“Shut up, really?” Matt says. He smiles and Shiro’s nerves smooth out a little 

“Yeah uh, met him when I was in Cuba. A guy who runs a surf shop down there. We’ve been talking and well, a few weeks ago we started dating,” Shiro admits.

“Are you sure about that?” Matt blurts out.

**_You’re an idiot._ **

He must catch how that sounds because he quickly sets his elbows on the table, leans forward when Shiro feels the back of his own chair dig under his shoulders. 

“I don’t-” Matt starts again, frustrated with himself. “That was rude, I’m sorry. You mean he lives in Cuba? You’re doing it long distance?” 

**_He doesn’t know you. You haven’t seen him in person in months._ **

Shiro clears his throat. “Yeah, it’s long distance. We talk three or four times a week.” Matt hums, taps his fingers on the table, but whatever he’s going to say (and Shiro  _ knows  _ he has something to say) is pushed back in favor of a soft smile. 

**_I don’t even have to tell you it’s a bad idea. He doesn’t know you._ **

“You have a picture of him? I wanna see,” Matt says and pats his hand on the table, asking for Shiro’s phone. Shiro pulls it out of his pocket. Relax your shoulders. He’s fine with it. You’re fine. Just show him a picture. Quit being so goddamn nervous all the time. 

Lance had, true to his word, sent him a picture after their call earlier. He was still sitting at his dining room table, but he had the balcony, covered in all his houseplants, at his back. Shiro hands the phone over to Matt who looks over it quietly. 

“He’s cute. What’s his name?”

“Lance,” Shiro answers. Matt hands the phone back and Shiro glances at the picture before he turns it face down on the table. 

“How’d you meet?” Matt says, he grins, but Shiro has the suspicion that his eyes don’t quite hold the same acceptance. Or he could be imagining that. Hell, it was hard to tell sometimes. 

“Well, I told you he runs a surf shop. It’s on the beach so I would drop by there after I swam in the mornings. He was always in there and..” Matt’s grin widens. 

“You thought he was cute?” Shiro nods. “You talked to him a lot?” 

“Ah, no, I was too shy. I only asked him for his number right before I came home,” Shiro admits. Matt only nods. 

**_No, you never gave him a chance to get to know you. You’re a stranger._ **

“He’s nice? He looks like he’s a sweetheart,” Matt says. 

**_Are you absolutely sure you’re not forcing him into a relationship? Is he just going along with you to be nice?_ **

“He really is. I like talking with him,” Shiro says. Matt chuckles. 

**_Are you sure he’s more than a friend?_ **

“Does he know about...” Matt says, lets the end of his sentence hang in the air. Shiro knows he’s talking about the crash. But that’s odd for Matt, who usually, on the uncommon event that it came up between the two of them, talked to Shiro about it openly. He had always been a strong believer that it did Shiro no good to skirt around the issue. It wasn’t good for Shiro to give in to his urges to hide.

“No, I- I haven’t brought it up yet,” Shiro sighs. “I mean, he’s definitely noticed something, but he doesn’t try to ask me about it.” 

“Why not?” Matt presses. Shiro frowns, lets out a deep breath.

**_Is he scared to ask? You push him away, and yet you call him a boyfriend._ **

“I don’t know how. He’s such a happy person. I can’t find a good time to be like ‘By the way, I fucked up reentry a few years ago and lost my arm in a cow pasture.’ It’s just not polite conversation, Matt,” Shiro says. Matt takes his little outburst admirably, shrugging it off. It’s not the first, or the worst, he’s had to put up with.

**_You’re just a coward. You can’t tell him what happened because you’ll only hurt him when he realizes you’re broken. So you keep secrets instead._ **

“Okay, you got me there,” Matt says after giving Shiro a beat of silence. “He’d probably like to know.” 

“You’re probably right. I’ll.. I’ll try to bring it up.” 

“Do you love him?” Matt asks. Shiro nods without hesitation. 

“Yeah. I really do.”

**_But at what cost?_ **

* * *

 

Matt had given him something to think about. Maybe not explicitly, but the conversation had brought up things Shiro was already thinking about and had just pushed to the side. Those lingering thoughts trailed after him even after the conversation moved on to other subjects, after Matt had gone home. They kept after him when he tried to sleep, when he went to work the next day and even now, as he lay in bed two days later. 

How well did they really know each other? He knew something of Lance’s life, about his family and friends, but hearing stories about them, fitting together the little pieces as they’re handed out, it’s not enough. It can’t replace being able to just pack up and go meet these people. It can’t replace being able to introduce himself, make himself at home and really live his life with Lance. 

And whatever he knew of Lance’s life, Lance knew less of his own. What was there to say? After he crashed, his life had become terribly depressing. How fun was it to talk about how he’d had to retire from his dream job early, move across the country. How pleasant was it to talk about how he’d lost not only everything he’d worked for, but a limb, his self-confidence? How did he tell Lance that up until a few years ago he was almost a completely different person?

It wasn’t fair to Lance. Who was he, to keep him tied up in a relationship they couldn’t act out on? With someone he had never really gotten a chance to know? They only had a matter of hours face to face. The only night they’d gotten to spend together was in a hotel room, not even able to savor it because Shiro had to leave for the United States.

Why had he ever thought this was a good idea? Lance shouldn’t be stuck with him. Not when he was broken, and scared, and perpetually absent. Lance deserved better than him. 

Shiro turns onto his stomach and groans into the pillow. It’s going to suck but he has to do it. It’ll be like tearing off a bandaid; stinging, but better than letting it fester. He paws for his phone and pulls up his texts with Lance. It doesn’t help at all that the last text Lance sent him was a bunch of kissing emojis. 

_ ‘Do you have time today? I want to talk about something important.’  _ Like always, Lance is quick to answer him. 

_ ‘good morning. u ok? no work today i can talk now if you don’t want to mess with skype’  _ Thank God, Lance wants to talk early. It’s rude to ruin his day but Shiro knows that if he waits it’ll only be harder to go through with it. 

_ ‘I want to say it face to face. Do you mind?’  _

_ ‘uh oh :/’  _ A short pause and Lance adds.  _ ‘gimme 5’ _

“What’s wrong, tigre?” Lance asks when he answers Shiro’s call. He’s still dressed in his pajamas, but his face is already lined with worry. “You never call me this early,” he adds, like that’s the only thing that’s off. 

“Well, I’ve been thinking for the past couple of days,” Shiro says. “About us,” Lance visibly deflates.

“Don’t say that,” Lance says. He already knows what’s coming, as if he can read Shiro’s mind. When Shiro glances at him he goes quiet. 

“I don’t know if us being in a relationship is the...best thing right now,” Shiro says, does his best to say it clearly and not rush through the words because if he’s going to hurt Lance like this he might as well not chicken out on how he does it. 

“You want to break up?” Lance’s bottom lip shakes and Shiro wants to take it back. He hates himself. He knows it’s his fault. But, he tells himself. This is better. Lance could find someone better than him. So he nods his head. 

“I’m sorry, it’s just-” Shiro’s cut off when Lance hitches so softly he hardly hears it. Shiro realizes he’s never seen him cry before. “I’m just not sure about the long distance thing. I-I know we were doing good keeping up with each other and everything,” Lance nods in agreement, though he visibly fights to keep himself composed. 

“But it’s not working?” Lance asks, his voice high and sad. Shiro grinds his teeth to keep himself steady. 

“You can do better than me,” Shiro starts. Lance gives him an ugly look. “We never really got to know each other. Like we could if we lived closer.” 

“Is it because I asked you to tell Matt about me?” Lance asks. Shiro pauses, surprised that he would make a connection like that.

“No, baby, of course not,” Shiro says. Lance doesn’t look entirely convinced and Shiro swears he feels his heart breaking when Lance looks at him so sadly. “It’s not anything you did it’s...personal. It’s just me. I…”

_ ‘I don’t want you to be stuck with me,’ _ he thinks. Lance looks supremely unhappy, his fingers shaking as he traces them over his bottom lip, a nervous tic Shiro never knew he had. A long pause hangs between them before Lance speaks up again, quiet.

“Can we still be friends?” he asks, sniffling when Shiro assures him they can. He wipes at his his eyes but a stray tear tracks down his cheek. Shiro wants to reach out for him so badly he feels it as a physical ache. 

“Lance…” Shiro starts but Lance talks over hims. 

“I-I need to go, okay?” Lance says, staring off somewhere to the side of the camera. “I’ll talk to you later.” With that, Lance hangs up on him, and Shiro is left in his dark office, staring at a dark screen. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know, my first outline of this last half of the fic (I'm guessimating that I'm just about reaching the halfway point) was very nice and fluffy? I think I just have it out for Shiro. Other things to look forward to just as the vaguest teasers: More Matt leading the Shiro Protection Squad. Keith is gonna show up at some point. Somewhere, in here, hopefully soon if it ends up fitting, I'll go into detail about Shiro's accident. (I'm reaching another point where it's just a bunch of scenes I haven't quite put into order yet so I can't tell you when exactly.) SHANCE.


	11. Be a Friend

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys ever have a certain person or relationship that's just super easy to write? For me it's Lance and Hunk. Their friendship is natural and easy and oh goodness I love it!
> 
> Again, a shorter chapter because I had scenes right next to each other that didn't quite feel right in a single chapter. Next one will be a bit longer and you'll see where I'm taking all this. ;)

Hunk, almost as a rule, never closed his front door. He lived in a tiny little house just off the beach and the only reason Lance didn’t consider it a shack was because it had running water and a tv. It always smelled good too, and when Lance steps up onto the porch he smells the savory hit of chicken along with the starchy softness of rice and something sweeter underneath. 

Lance pads into the open living room and when he doesn’t immediately see Hunk he stretches out on his couch with a heavy sigh. It’s a little cold today so Lance paws around behind him until he can pull the quilt draped over the back of the couch on top of himself and curl up in it. It’s all he’s wanted to do for the past few days, just roll himself up and hide his face and not deal with anything. 

Hunk’s heavy footsteps come in from the other room, pausing in the doorway between living room and kitchen. Lance can’t see him where he’s got his face tucked into the sleeve of his jacket, but he feels Hunk’s eyes on him nonetheless. He can almost imagine his expression. Somewhat soft, somewhat irritated and Lance already knows what he’s thinking. 

_ I told you so.  _

He knows! He knows. No one even had to say it, Lance already knows he was really, really stupid to think he could manage a long distance relationship. Hunk was the only person who knew about the breakup but Lance is already sure that everyone was expecting it. Everyone but himself. Of  _ course  _ it wouldn’t last long. They probably thought the month he had managed to string along his relationship with Shiro was impressive already but now that it was over, there was nothing left. 

Everything was flat and boring, but at the same time he was finding himself questioning a lot of things. Why had Shiro wanted to break up? Lance had been tossing that question around a lot for the last few days. Maybe he was boring. Maybe he came across as stupid. Was he too pushy? Needy? Annoying? Did Shiro just get tired of him? Did Shiro find someone else? 

Maybe there was something going on in Shiro’s life that was bothering him and Lance hadn’t picked up on it. He’d probably been too selfish, too caught up in the fact that he had  _ a boyfriend  _ to really give the man the attention he needed. Lance can’t count the times he’d thought Shiro seemed sad, or distracted, but instead of asking him what was wrong he’d tried to glance off the subject and cheer him up instead. Was that bad? Lance pouts against his sleeve. In the near five months they had known each other, Lance had never figured out the story behind Shiro’s missing arm. What if he shouldn’t have avoided that subject...maybe that had made Shiro think he didn’t care…

“You didn’t say anything when you came in.” Hunk’s big hand rubs Lance’s head through the quilt, the soft crackle of static in Lance’s hair following when he pulls away. He nudges Lance, who squirms away long enough for Hunk to sit by his head and let him settle it in his lap. 

“I’m really mean, Hunk,” Lance whines. His voice is muffled through the quilt and his jacket sleeve. Hunk tugs the blanket down to Lance’s nose, but lets him hide for the most part. When he’d first told Hunk that Shiro had broken up with him, he had expected him to be somewhat disgruntled with him for getting so attached. Or defensive about Shiro hurting him, but it had been neither. Instead, they both sat there watching the movie Hunk had on the tv, his thumb rubbing up and down the back of his neck. 

“What happened?” Hunk asks. Lance hums noncommittally. He didn’t really know. He thought they were fine, maybe Shiro was a little withdrawn but nothing strange, but then all the sudden Shiro’s telling him they should break up. 

“Just wanted to talk one morning. Said he’d been thinking and that he wasn’t sure a relationship was the best idea,” Lance mumbles. Hunk rubs little circles into the nape of his neck and Lance lets his eyes fall closed. 

“Did he give you any reason why?” Lance frowns. He thinks of Shiro looking so sorry, thinks of Shiro saying  _ ‘You can do better than me’  _ and Lance being so confused he could think of nothing else than what he could have possibly done to make Shiro want to wash his hands of him. 

“Something along the lines of ‘It’s not you, it’s me,’” Lance mimes, he quirks his fingers under the quilt with the quotation, but all he sees is a slightly moving lump. Hunk heaves a sigh, digs his fingers into Lance’s hair and scratches him affectionately. 

“It’s always something personal. No idea what happened at all?” he presses. Lance shakes his head while inwardly beating himself up for not being more supportive of Shiro. How stupid of him, to have such a sweet and handsome boyfriend and then neglect him. 

“Not really. He didn’t seem mad or anything.” Hunk pats his shoulder. 

“He’ll get over it then,” Hunk says with a surety like he’d been there to witness the conversation. Lance doesn’t feel terribly reassured and deflates a little. 

“Yeah,” Lance sighs. Hunk scratches him gently. “He did say we could still be friends,” he admits. Though he’s not entirely sure if Shiro just said that to soothe him; he hasn’t had to heart to try and talk to Shiro since they broke up. And Shiro hadn’t tried to contact him either. 

“It’s alright man. Give it a bit and see how it goes,” he hums. He grips Lance’s shoulder and gently pulls him onto his back so they can look at each other. The blanket feels heavy over the bridge of Lance’s nose. Lance does his best to look sad, but it’s harder when Hunk idly plays with his hair. 

Hunk watches the tv for a few seconds, his eyes dark and thinking. “I gave him some crap at first but, I don’t know. It’s pretty obvious that he made you happy, you know?” Hunk starts. Lance nods his head, his chest warming a little hearing that. Oh, he misses Shiro! “If I were you,” Hunk continues, “I’d just give it a break for a little bit and try to be a good friend.” 

Lance isn’t completely sure how he feels about that answer. It’s smart, sure. He can’t have the romance he used to have with Shiro but he’s still  _ there  _ he can still have some kind of relationship with him. But he  _ loves  _ him. Lance knows that by the way his heart weighs so heavy in his chest it feels like it’ll drop out of his back and to the floor. He knows it in his thoughts, always wondering back to Shiro; what he’s doing, where he is, if he’s okay, if he’s happy. 

It hurts him to think that he has to compromise. He wants what he used to have, what he had for just short of a month. He wants  _ more  _ than he had. He wants to be with Shiro physically. He wishes he could touch him, hold him, just see him on a normal day. 

But he can’t have even that. Hunk is suggesting, and Lance knows that it’s a very good suggestion, that he keep Shiro at arms length. They can be friends, but nothing more. All affection would have to be platonic. Lance would either have to hold his hope that Shiro would want to resume a relationship or squash down whatever romantic feelings he had and save himself the hurt when one of them eventually moved on. 

Hunk brings him back from his thoughts by tapping the wrinkle in his brow and forcefully smoothing it out. 

“Hey, cheer up while you’re in my house. I made your favorites for dinner. Come on,” Hunk urges. He gently pushes Lance up out of his lap and tugs the quilt off of him. Lance pouts at being jostled when he was so comfortable but well, that food does smell good.

“Did you make me m&m cookies like I asked?” Lance asks. Hunk scoffs like he’s just asked if the ocean was outside. 

“Of course.” 


	12. Crash

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Holy crap finally that Shiro background I've been promising for so long.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Blood/Gore Warning: If it bothers you, skip the section that's in ITALICS. Seriously. Considering this is the event that messed Shiro up so badly in the first place, I tried to be pretty graphic with it.
> 
> Other tags I'm adding (panic attacks, though not very graphic) are also important. I warning y'all, if it really bugs you, you're probably best off skipping pretty much everything but the last few paragraphs of this chapter. 
> 
> Otherwiiise, not a ton going on. I'm gonna really try to get another chapter out over the next couple of days because pokemon comes out on Friday and that's going to take up my time for a few days at least.

The offices at Goddard Research Facility took on a surreal atmosphere after dark. Most of the overhead lights shut off automatically after business hours, leaving the huge room cast in the dim light of scant florescence. Shiro's cubicle was lit further by the blue glow coming off his monitor. Somewhere off in the distance he could hear the steady tapping as Matt worked, keyboard clacking along with every letter, every sentence.

 

What's he working on, Shiro wonders. Shiro isn't working on anything at all. Shiro has his hands sitting on the desk in front of him, one washed out, anemic skin, the other all dark necrotic joints and metallic gleam. Unnatural. Disgusting. Shiro stares. He thinks.

 

_The lights aren't solid blue. They're red, flashing. They're everywhere. The keyboard isn't whole; it's shattered in a million glittering pieces. Sharp pieces that cut through his suit and lodge under his skin. The entire console bulges in towards him like a tumor, like a cannonball's shot through it._

 

_He remembers... He crashed?_

 

_Yes._

 

_Where?_

 

_Not the Gulf of Mexico like planned. That was sure._

 

_That might be sure._

 

_Maybe, somehow, the outer hull has stayed water tight and even now he's sinking to the sea floor. Then the question would be how long could he survive with the oxygen in the pod. Not that long with the way he's hyperventilating. Stop that. Stop that! You're only rushing the inevitable. A second part of him speaks up. The hull is compromised. It has to be considering how the console is crushed in on him._ _What's more likely is that it'll give in under pressure any second now and then Shiro can entertain himself seeing what kind of math he can do while he's drowning._

 

_A third part of him fights for dominance. They have to be on land. Feel how the seatbelts dig into your gut? Into your shoulders? The ocean isn't tossing you around. You're on land. Gravity is holding steady, see? Savor it. You haven't felt gravity like this in six months. Savor it, but don't let your seatbelt loose. You're facing the ground. The seatbelt is the only thing holding you back from falling face first into that mangled horror of circuitry that used to be the control panel. It's sharp. Something sparks deep behind the metal panels._

 

_The lights flash. One, two, three, four. Shiro can't remember if there's supposed to be an alarm that goes off with it. Is it broken, or is it his hearing that's shot? It doesn't matter. Count the flashes until he can think._

 

_He should wait. Control would have been watching him this entire time. If he landed anywhere remotely near the Texas coast, a team should be here to retrieve him at any time. He'll just have to put up with this for a couple hours._

 

_What happened?_

_The parachutes. Shiro flexes his fingers. The left hand works, reluctantly, but he can make a decently firm fist. Something's lodged in his forearm. Shrapnel, probably. The parachutes failed. First the main, then the reserve, now the lights are washing over everything._

 

_The right hand? He tries, again and again. He's looking at it. He thinks hard. He focuses everything he can on working through that hot pain in his bicep and making a fist but his fingers only give a weak twitch and that's all. His arm just hangs beneath him, brushing a jagged edge of the control panel. Why can't he feel very much? All he can tell is that maybe his glove is filling up with something wet. He can feel it sloshing over his prickling skin. Maybe water from the cooling system in his suit? His bicep burns so hot he can hardly think of anything else but still he tries to figure out why he can't move his hand for several seconds before thinks to look._

 

_His suit hangs in a tattered edge towards his elbow. It's not water filling up his glove. It's blood. He can hardly see his skin through the red sheeting down his sleeve. There's a deep, gash cut into his bicep, down to the bone. That has to be bone, that pink round spot deep in his arm. No wonder he can't use his hand. Shiro stares at the wound, watching was blood wells up in a fresh stream with every heartbeat._

 

_Stop the bleeding!_

 

_The thought shrieks through his mind. If he doesn't stop that while he's still somewhat alert, he'll loose too much and grow too lethargic to do anything about it even if he does stay conscious. Shiro looks around the cockpit. What can he use?_

 

_There's a length of rubber hose hanging down in his field of vision. What's in it? Oxygen? Bad. The sparks will light it in seconds. Same thing with CO2. He'll suffocate. Water? Maybe, but he'd have to be extra careful about the electricity running through the console in front of him. Shiro reaches back with his left hand. He hooks his fingers around it with some effort and squeezes it as hard as he can. It's not hollow, so it doesn't have any gas in it. Probably another electrical wire then. It'll be hard as hell to rip out, but what's another few sparks when he's already got them threatening from the front?_

 

_Tugs it. Hooks more of his fingers through it. He's getting woozy, nausea rising in his stomach as he loses more blood. He's got to it free as fast as he can. If he doesn't get enough for a tourniquet, he can just forget getting out of here. He doesn't think he has enough time to find another alternative before it's too late._

 

_Deep breath. His arms are screaming. He shivers with a cold sweat. Hard as he can._

 

_He hauls forward on the wire hard. Everything in his body hounds at him. Just stop. Just go to sleep. It hurts too much. No. Not yet. The wire moved. It's not free, but now Shiro can wrap his whole hand around it._

 

_Once more, he yanks the wire hard as he can. It shudders and one end comes free in a shower of sparks. A piece of metal hits him in the back of he head and goes clattering to the floor. Shiro feels more blood well up from the fresh wound, dribbling slowly down the back of his neck. That's okay._

 

_He coils the wire around his hand. Once, twice. Almost three times around. That's enough! That should be enough for a tourniquet. It'll tide him over until a team can come and pick him up._

 

_He pulls again and the wire digs into his hand. One more! Just a little more! He needs this. **He** **needs this.**_

 

_“Come on you fuck. Work with me-” Shiro says. He's shivering. That cold is creeping in on him. He's lost too much blood already. Deep breath. Another. A third._

 

_He wrenches down on the wire as hard as he can will himself. Keep the pressure up. The wire digs in through his glove. Give. Giving. The other end comes free so suddenly that he ends up punching himself in the thigh._

 

_He's got a tourniquet but for several seconds Shiro just sits there, gasping as the seatbelts dig into his chest and push on his lungs. It hurts. It all hurts, and Shiro hears himself whimpering from some distant place. Don't wanna do this. Don't wanna be here anymore. Wanna go home. Now. Please? Now?_

 

_That third voice comes back when the first two dissolve into sniveling and trying to lick their wounds._

 

_The wire! What did you work so hard for? Stop the bleeding! Stop it! Then you can sleep. Then you can go home. But you have to stop the bleeding first._

 

_Shiro puffs, tries to shake the wire off his hand before he realizes that's exactly how he'll fling it into the floor and lose it forever. He grips one end between his teeth instead and, panting, uncoils it. It's hard to wrap the thing around his arm when he only has one hand to manage it, but soon enough he has it wrapped tight just under his armpit. He pulls it as hard as he can, twists and twists until he doesn't have the strength to tighten it anymore. The wound on the back of his head keeps dripping, dripping... it feels like fingers, moving up and down..._

 

“Shiro?”

 

Matt's patting the top of his head, standing nearly at arms length like he's dealing with a scared dog. Shiro blinks. No blinking red lights. No sparks. No blood. No arm. Only the steady blue glow from his computer monitor. He's not in a cattle field miles on the wrong side of Corpus Christi. He's in a cubicle 2,000 miles north.

 

“Hey, hey,” Matt soothes. The fingers in his hair drop to his shoulder, the tips digging softly into the rock hard muscle under his skin. Shiro reminds himself to feel it. Reminds himself over and over again that he's just sitting here. There's nothing going on. He's _fine._

 

_Get over it._

 

“Shiro come on. You're okay,” Matt continues. He rubs him between his shoulders. “Breathe, alright?” He walks Shiro through several deep breathes, every drag of air needling his lungs. He gone again, his shoes shuffling quietly on the carpet, and Shiro's left alone in his cubicle taking gasping, labored breaths. Shiro sets his elbows on the edge of his desk. He only feels one; the other a distant register of pressure from his prosthetic. When he scrubs at his face, feels wetness. He jerks them back but instead of seeing the sticky darkness of blood it's only tears.

 

'This is why you broke it off with Lance,' he thinks to himself. Shit like this. Just sitting in his cubicle and he has a damn panic attack. His computer monitor. Not turning on the desk lamp. The quiet around him. It all set him off. What if he had done that while he was talking to Lance? Lance... he doesn't know that part of him. Seeing this secret side of him... he'd only scare Lance away.

 

He's scary. He's unstable. He's undeserving. Shiro shivers against his desk and bites down on his lip. It's too easy to see himself losing control, blowing up in anger or despair or just bursting into tears like this. He can too easily imagine Lance recoiling in fear or confusion. Maybe he would lose respect for him. Maybe he wouldn't want to come back.

 

But Shiro wants him to. Lance, some deep part of him says, would understand. Lance was beautiful and sympathetic and just... _good._ Life has been so hard and flat since he caved and broke it off. Lance would be so nice to talk to right now. He'd love to just speak his mind about what he's feeling and in a perfect world Lance would just _get_ it. He'd smooth out all the wrinkles in Shiro's emotions, reassure him that he's okay and then offer him a comforting distraction just by being there.

 

In a perfect world he could go home and find Lance already there, smelling of sea salt and sunshine, a bright light in the middle of his living room. Shiro could hug him, bury his nose in his hair and just hold him close and lose himself and forget about everything that weighs him down.

 

Matt's back, pushing a bottle of water and a packet of tissues into his hands. Shiro squeezes them both and lets out a slow breath. Doesn't work. He hiccups and Matt chuckles softly as he pilfers a chair from a neighboring cubicle.

 

“I miss Lance...” Shiro mutters. Matt's chair squeaks as he leans forward and rolls further into the cubicle and into Shiro's space.

 

“Why would you miss Lance?” Matt asks, concern tinging his voice darker. Shiro shakes his head. He'd never told Matt about breaking up over the past couple of weeks. He hitches again, takes another swallow of water and paws around for the tissue. He gives up on it and rubs his eyes with his sleeve instead. “Did something happen?” There's no sense in trying to talk out of it; Matt already knows. Matt knows him well enough to read his mind.

 

“Broke up with him,” Shiro admits through a heavy sigh. He wants to look at Matt and try to read his expression, but instead he just stares at his keyboard, shoves back the image of the blown in console. “I... I don't know. I-”

 

“If you say that you weren't good enough for him, I'm pulling you out of this cubicle and the security guys are gonna have a real fun time watching me pummel you silly,” Matt huffs. Shiro stiffens despite knowing it's an empty lie. His face heats in shame and he plucks up the packet of tissues again to wring it between his fingers. More staring at the keyboard, more trying to ignore the tears itching down his cheeks.

 

Matt's chair clatters as he stands. Shiro flinches back, but Matt grips a handful of the back of his sweater, pushing him firmly into his chair. Shiro thinks, wildly, that Matt wasn't joking after all and that he really was about to get his ass kicked by a man a third smaller than him in front of all the security cameras on the floor. He stiffens, expecting Matt to start pulling at him.

 

He doesn't pull at Shiro. Instead, he pushes more of his weight on his shoulders, making himself a rather strange blanket as he hugs Shiro around his neck. Matt heaves a tired sigh and sets his cheek on top of Shiro's head.

 

“You're a real idiot,” Matt says. He thumps Shiro in the middle of his back hard enough to sting. Shiro mumbles something to agree with him and takes whatever Matt gives him. “You had a super cute boyfriend and you made yourself nervous.” Matt says with the confidence of a doctor passing out a diagnosis.

 

“You're still talking to him?” Matt asks. Shiro huffs in a sound meaning 'No. I haven't had the nerve to talk to him again even though he tries to text me sometimes'. Matt understands completely and tugs his ear hard enough to pull Shiro out of his mind enough to hiss in pain.

 

Matt turns, still holding Shiro, and kicks the stolen chair out of the cubicle. Now he really is trying to pull Shiro up.

 

“Go clean up,” Matt says. Shiro doesn't try to fight him and stands, though Matt doesn't let go of him at first and Shiro winds up bending awkwardly at the waist to keep from lifting Matt completely. “You're gonna stay at my house tonight,” Matt says. That's his business tone, the one meaning he would take no fighting even if Shiro was in the mood to try it. So when he lets him go, Shiro wanders off feeling somewhat out of sorts.

* * *

 

Matt watches Shiro walk down the length of the room and turn down the hall in the direction of the bathrooms. What a mess! No sooner had Shiro told him he had a boyfriend than he's admitting the broke up two weeks later. Matt lets out a slow breath and pushes his hair back from his face.

 

Okay. What to do? Lance was obviously an important person. In all the time he's know Shiro, he's been painfully shy and self-conscious. For him to suddenly jump back into dating after years of seeming perfectly content on his own was a big deal. Matt would see hell freeze over before he let Shiro just toss this out in a bout of self-loathing.

 

Probably, it wasn't his business. It was meddling to get into his friend's love life but well, he and Pidge were notorious meddlers. Almost unapologetic. And Shiro needed this. He needed Lance. Matt didn't have to meet Lance at all to know he was important in Shiro's wellbeing. Letting this relationship fall to the side and dissolve completely would be a crime not only of love, but of his loyalty to Shiro. Long distance or not, Shiro breaking this off was a step back.

 

Matt steps into Shiro's cubicle and settles into his chair. He doesn't know. He was never really privy to their relationship but he could see well enough how happy Shiro was when they were together. Shiro needed to keep contact with Lance just for the sake of his personal progress.

 

Something buzzes on the desk beside him and Matt flinches back from his thoughts. It's Shiro's phone. It buzzes again and Matt leans over, peering at the screen. It's a text. From Lance.

 

_'Hunk and I watching Contact 2nite.'_

_'is it gud?'_

 

An idea springs to life just as brightly as the screen he's looking at. It's a long shot, but it might work. Matt rolls the chair over to the entrance of the cubicle and peers down towards the bathrooms. No sign of Shiro. Good. He rolls back to the desk, grabs one of Shiro's post-it notes and a pen. Plucking up the phone (Shiro never kept good passwords. The one for his phone is the year of his first space flight), Matt scrolls through his list of contacts and writes down Lance's number. He sets the phone back right where he found it, carefully locking it again. The post-it note goes into his jacket pocket. It's a long shot, but he can try.


	13. Baggage Claim

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not dead. Just incredibly freaking tired. *the weakest thumbs up*
> 
> Uh, so it's been like almost five weeks since I last posted? Which, I'm sorry about that. I've got the whole list of the usual excuses that comes with the end of the year along with a bit of falling off the writing wagon for a short while This chapter probably isn't worth the wait but I'm kind of prepared for that. 
> 
> Future plans: Christmas is early next week. All I can say is 'I'll try', but towards the end of the year a lot of these bats should be out of my hair for a minute. I want to wrap this up in some kind of timely fashion (I'm aiming so hard for the premier of S2) but my plans always change as I write along. That's basically all I have. Thanks for being patient.

_ 'Lance? My name is Matt Holt. I'm a friend of Shiro. Are you his boyfriend?'  _ the guy had said. There had been a weird emphasis on  _ boyfriend  _ and when Lance had tried to correct him, Matt had shrugged it off. Lance shakes his knee in the scant space he has between the chair in front of him. It's doing little more than rubbing his knee raw against the denim of his jeans. This was crazy.

_ 'He's been having a hard time of it lately, and I wanted to surprise him. I know it's a big favor, but would you mind coming up to Cleveland for a few days?'  _ Lance remembers lying there on his couch and almost flinging his phone somewhere into the ether. Excitement or outright fear, he didn't know. Shiro might not take a surprise like that well. He's the one that wanted to break up, and then never wanted to talk to him.

_ 'I know! He's being so dramatic about it!'  _ Matt had said when Lance told him as much.  _ 'I know for sure that he really, really cares about you. He's pretty obvious about it. Lance, please, I feel like this is really important,”  _ Lance listened as Matt promised to buy his ticket, and if it really did go poorly, Lance could either stay at his home and enjoy an impromptu vacation or Matt would help him go home early.

_ 'I just hope that seeing you in person would help shake him out of this rut he's got himself in.'  _ Alright. Lance would give in. He would come to Cleveland and settle for having Shiro reject him to his face one last time. So what about eight hours of airport time over two days. Or maybe he would stay a few more. He did have some money saved up and he'd never gotten to go to America.

Oh, God, he wants to see Shiro so badly. Wants to hear his voice and  _ touch  _ him, even if it's just a friendly hug. He hasn't seen Shiro in person since August when the sea was still warm and he was sitting behind the counter of the shop. He can remember Shiro wandering shirtless into his shop, showing off so much warm skin and how his whole body displayed a casual, but humble strength. He thinks in little flashes of Shiro pushing him against the bathroom sink, thinks of Shiro looming over him in the hotel room later on as they moved together.

But it's more than that. It's the soft way Shiro looks at him. His strong voice. His kindness. His intelligence. The bouts of shyness that would overcome him when they would talk. The way he'd chew on his lip when he was thinking. How he always seemed to know exactly what Lance was thinking, what Lance wanted and how it seemed like he'd go to the ends of the Earth to help him. All the little things that made Shiro so perfect.

So what if this didn't go well? What if Shiro sees him and decides he doesn't want to be around him? What if he's only playing nice? What if he's only putting up with Lance while he's here? Lance lets out a slow breath and realizes his nerves are pulling his chest tight across his ribs.

Lance hunches over himself in his tiny chair, watching as people shuffle off the plane in a slow moving line. His hands feel too cold and his heart feels like it's beating too hard. He tries to swallow it down and tug his sleeves over his hands, but they're far too short to manage. He has to give up on it when most of the passengers file out of the plane and the flight attendant is giving him a funny look from the front of the plane.

Lance stands and pulls his carry-on bag down from the overhead compartment. He slings it over his shoulder and heads to the front of the plane, bumping seats left and right. The flight attendant gives him a polite smile and asks him if he has a jacket.

Compared to the plane and Havana, the airport in Cleveland is like stepping into a ball pit. Lance follows the trickling line of people he shared a flight with out of the gate but they vanish completely into the crowd as soon as they hit one of the wide corridors. Lance finds himself surrounded by storefronts, brightly colored tourists, patterned suitcases, vending machines. Lance's head swims. Every inch of wall is covered in art; colorful, drab, complex, simple, words, faces, abstract shapes. The very air is filled to the brim with voices and music, the smells of food and perfume.

By Varadero standards, he's a social butterfly, but Lance finds his mind is somewhat scattered with so many distractions going on. He eases his way to a place nearer the wall and looks around at the signs overhead. Gate numbers, names...baggage claim. He needs to get his suitcase. Matt said he would meet him there.

Lance looks down at his ticket, double checking the numbers for the fortieth time despite the fact that he's pretty sure he's on the only flight coming straight from Havana today. He goes down the line reading city names off the hanging screens to himself. London, Minneapolis, Madrid, Phoenix-

A body collides with him. Lance cracks his chin on the side of the person's head and they both go stumbling, Lance dropping his bag and nearly tripping over it while his victim curses over the din of the crowd around them.

“What the hell? Watch where you're going!” Lance blinks, realizes the guy is talking to him, and his hackles raise. He picks up his bag, slings it over his shoulder again. He looks around and sees there's several people looking his way and no, he doesn't want to cause a scene ten minutes in America.

This guy, with his stupid mullet and dumb red jacket that doesn't even fit (seriously, who dressed him?) isn't going to sour his visit. He's here to see Shiro, not argue with a weird foreigner. So instead of giving in and spitting back his best, he hitches his bag up further on his shoulder and sniffs in distaste.

“Sorry about that,” Lance says. The guy's brows furrow like he's confused that Lance doesn't want to fight in the middle of a crowded airport. “Little overwhelmed by how many people are here,” he adds. He turns on his heel, looks up at the sign over the next belt and...

_ Arriving from: Havana, Cuba _

Well that really takes the wind out of his sails. Lance stops before he really even gets started and he's stuck there with his back to the guy he'd just bowled over and pissed off, looking around for a place to hide. There isn't really one. The whole room is big and open and everyone is bundled up into little groups around their own conveyors while they wait for their suitcases. Lance narrows his eyes down the length of the belt, wondering if he could disappear into this little crowd if he snuck down to the other end.

“Are you kidding me? Your gate's seriously right here?” Lance can almost feel the guy turn around and give him a second look. Lance bristles at the amusement tinging to man's voice and he shoots him a sharp look over his shoulder.

“I wasn't the one who decided to put Havana next to...” he glances up at the sign. “San Antonio?” Mullet nods.

“Texas?” he supplies. Lance huffs and turns to face him again, dropping his bag at his side.

“I  _ know  _ what Texas is. Everything's bigger there? Even a poor little Cuban boy like me knows what Texas is,” Lance says. “Why don't they put these gates together alphabetically or something? I wasn't expecting my gate to come up and ran right into you because I was going too fast.”  _ Smooth.  _ Lance thinks to himself. Slide that apology right in there and start your stay in America with a sparkling reputation. The man either doesn't pick up on it or doesn't care because all he does is shrug. Irritating that he apparently didn't feel like acknowledging Lance's power of polite conversation.

“You have family up here? Ohio is really, really far north to see someone like you here. Chicago is probably better for vacation but...” Lance can almost see the guy pondering over the fact that it's early December in his head.

“It's cold?” Lance tugs on the sleeves of his hoodie. “Yeah, I'm... kind of visiting someone,” he says. The guy's eyes narrow.

“Kind of?” he asks and Lance is stumped on how to respond. He wonders first if an internet ex-boyfriend really counts as family and second if he's technically  _ meeting  _ him if he doesn't know Lance is coming, but in the end he's here and-

“Keith!” “Lance?”

Lance perks up at the sound of his name. He turns, tries to look over the heads of the crowd and it feels like his eyes are drawn to him all on their own, picking out the white fringe, dark eyes blown wide with surprise, the cute scar across his nose. _Shiro._ It feels like all the air in his lungs rushes out all at once and he's starstruck. Lance stares. Shiro stares back. Until a shorter brunet grabs Shiro by the arm and drags him closer. Lance can hardly take his eyes off Shiro as they bully their way through the thinning crowd.

“You already found each other!” the brunet says. Mullet (Keith?) glances sidelong at Lance and at almost the same time a smaller, more feminine version of the brunet appears on the other side of Shiro and Lance immediately pins her as some kind of sibling.

“It's nice to finally meet you Lance!” she says but then she changes her momentum, pulling Keith into a hug and squeezing him so hard he wheezes. Someone grips Lance's upper arm and it's the brunet, not Shiro. Shiro still stands in front of him, his back stiff and straight and just watching him quietly. Lance finds himself in a tight circle of strangers and the only person he knows, who he  _ aches  _ for, still hasn't said a word to him.

“Has he introduced himself yet?” the brunet asks and then keeps talking before Lance has a chance to even think about answering him. “Of course not. He's Keith,” the brunet says and points to Mullet. “He's visiting us from Texas for a few weeks.” Brunet moves on to the girl. “This is my little sister Katie.”

“Or you can call me Pidge. Whatever floats your boat,” she adds.

“I'm Matt,” the brunet says. He tugs Lance into a firm hug and no sooner does he let go than he's grabbing Keith by the jacket and tugging him over towards one of the conveyors spouting something about Keith needing to find his suitcases and wondering aloud how they're going to fit five people and several bags into a sedan. Pidge trails after them and did she just wink at him over her shoulder?

“Uh,” Lance starts. He can see the three of them, just out of earshot, with hardly anyone between them but there's this overwhelming sense that he's finally alone with Shiro. And he has no idea what to do. He's almost too scared to look him in the face and see just what he's thinking. So he turns, staring hard into the conveyor so hard he hardly imagines he would see his bag even if it passed right in front of him. It feels like a long string of seconds before he hears Shiro heave a sigh and come towards him.

“Was your flight okay?” Shiro asks as he sidles up to stand next to Lance. He can see the edge of his coat out of the corner of his eye. It's too big for him and Lance wonders if he's lost weight since he's last seen him. Lance nods, realizes he's not sure if Shiro's even looking at him or watching the conveyor belt as well, and clears his throat.

“I, uh, it was fine. I got here, didn't I?” he jokes, watching the suitcases rumble past them. He sighs softly. “I've never flown before. I was pretty nervous,” he admits. He feels a rambling coming on and he forcefully swallows it back. There's so much more he wants to say.  _ I missed you. Are you angry I’m here? Do you still love me? Do you want me to go home? What made you want to leave? _

“You're okay now?” Shiro asks. Lance sees his shoes shift out of the corner of his eye and Lance finds the nerve to glance up at him. He isn't sure what he sees in Shiro's expression. Sadness? Dissatisfaction? Longing? The look on Shiro's face reminds him a little of his nephew when he thinks Lance might be taking him to get ice cream at the beach but isn't quite sure if he should get his hopes up. Cute and a little heartbreaking at the same time. What was he thinking? The corner of Shiro's mouth turns down, he glances at the conveyor belt again. “You look a little nervous,” he says finally.

_ You think?  _ Lance wonders to himself. It was almost like packing up and going on a mini-vacation to try and convince his ex-boyfriend to take him back was a bad idea. Just thinking it through like this made him feel all jumpy and stalkerish.

“I'm wondering if coming up here was too much of a surprise,” Lance admits. ‘I probably look entirely too desperate and pathetic. Just leave my bag here. I’m going home,’ he thinks to himself. Shiro's shoulders relax a little and he offers Lance a small smile.

“No, it's not too much,” Shiro says. His hand twitches, like he's going to reach out and touch Lance but in the end he just shoves it into his pocket. “To be honest, I could tell Matt was up to something when he asked me if I wanted to come along and pick up Keith this morning.” He smiles fondly. “He's not as sneaky as he thinks he is but...”

“He called me about a week ago and asked if I wanted to come up and see you,” Lance answers. He shrugs, signing that he didn't really have the heart to pass up on an opportunity like that. Shiro looks like he's about to speak up, but he glances past Lance's shoulder and frowns. The other three are already waiting just outside the door, Pidge and Matt radiating hope while Keith looks like he's just shy of sulking off on his own.

“Let's find your bags,” Shiro sighs and steps forward to grab the tag on a suitcase to read the name as it passes by. Another short pause as Lance watches his bag roll by for probably the third or fourth time by now before Shiro speaks up again. “Did you decide where you'd be staying yet?”

“Ah, well, in a perfect world, I'd love to stay with you,” 

‘Stupid, why would you even invite yourself over like that. Too creepy!’ his mind interjects.

“-but if that’s not cool then Matt's already offered up a bedroom at his parents' house. And, if not that, I'll stay in a hotel,” he says. He steps up to get his bag as it rumbles by yet again but Shiro beats him to it, hauling the heavy suitcase as easily as hauling a down pillow. He still doesn't give it up when Lance tries to take the handle from him. Their hands touch and Lance indulges himself in it, lets his fingers pause on top of Shiro’s while the inside of his skull echoes with the power of him screaming at himself to quit being such a fucking weirdo. He gives up the suitcase and busies himself with fiddling with the strap over his shoulder instead.

“I'd like it if you'd stay with me,” Shiro says. Lance tips his head back a little, just a bit, to look Shiro in the eye. The dark gray looks almost like steel where Shiro’s facing the sunlight. Lance wonders if that soft glint of unsurety is really there or if he’s just gotten so out of it with nerves he’s started seeing things. Lance’s mind runs wild over going to Shiro’s house. They’ve already dated, they’ve already had all those moments of emotion and intimacy and already broken apart but he’s never had the chance to do something as simple as go to Shiro’s house. His mind is a war between joy and firm reminders not to screw himself over when Shiro’s giving him so much.

“You’re sure?” Lance asks. His heart beats odd and high in his chest. Shiro’s brow raises in surprise.

“Yeah?” Shiro says. “If you don’t mind. I have a spare room ready. I can just tell Keith that plans changed at the last minute. I really doubt he’s going to care as long as we don’t toss him out on the street.” Shiro adds. He smiles and Lance struggles for a couple of seconds to copy him because he’s a little sure he’s just made some kind of unknown enemy here.

‘What’s Keith doing staying with Shiro?’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *waves at whoever's bothered to wait around for my slow-writing ass*


	14. Guest Room

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got a decent sized chapter out omg. 
> 
> I hope everyone is having some good holidays~
> 
> I'm absolutely loving the fact that Shiro and Lance are in the same house right now. I'm having to physically restrain myself from going full Hallmark on you guys. 
> 
> Next chapter is a good bit of Keith and Lance figuring out how wild America is in December.

The sedan Matt mentioned earlier did wind up fitting five people and several bags, but it was only just. WIth Matt driving, Keith had somehow gotten shotgun. Which, he couldn’t complain. One of Keith’s suitcases rest in the seat next him, forcing Matt up into the steering wheel while Pidge perched on top of it, tangled up in the seatbelt in a way that Lance was pretty sure it was more for show than anything.

His own bags have somehow fit into the trunk but Lance thinks that he might be packed in tighter in the middle of the back seat. On one side Keith’s suitcase digs into his thigh. On the other, Shiro is trapped in between Lance and the door. Even if he were to lean away, he doesn’t have enough room between the suitcase and Shiro to move much and he winds up with Shiro pressed down the whole length of his side, close enough that Shiro has his arm up on the back of the seat behind his head.

The air in the car holds the same chill as the air outside. Which is biting, crawling in through the window glass and the open collar of his jacket even after he’s zipped it up all the way to the neck like a nerd. He can hear Matt has the heat running full blast in the front of the car but it’s not enough. Hot air makes it back to him in little puffs but it doesn’t compare to the warmth seeping through Shiro’s coat and into his skin.

It’s distracting. Matt’s up front talking to Keith about the weather, maybe interchanging with something about some kind of office, but Lance can’t hear much of it. When Shiro speaks up to one of Keith’s questions, Lance can’t think back on what he’d said even seconds later. All he can think about is the way Shiro’s voice had rumbled through his chest and into his shoulder, so strong even through layers of clothing.

Matt asks something and the car pauses for a long second, then Shiro’s fingers brush a piece of hair at Lance’s temple, raising goosebumps on the back of his neck. He thinks of pushing into the touch and twitches back. He sits up further in his seat and feels Shiro’s arm bump the back of his head.

“Sorry, I missed it,” Lance says when he sees both Matt looking at him in the rearview mirror.

“I was asking if you wanted to borrow my jacket out of the back window there, you look like you’re freezing,” Matt says. Lance realizes then that he’s got his arms wrapped around himself. Half of it is trying not to be too intimate with Shiro so close to him and part of it is actually the chill. He smiles politely and shakes his head, wishing he could just tuck himself into Shiro’s coat because he’s pretty sure he’d never be cold again there.

“Ah, no, I’m okay. I can tell the car’s warming up now,” he says. Keith nods, the heat blowing from the vents in the front of the car fluffing up his hair. Lance tosses around for a train of conversation that isn’t about Shiro touching him or how nice his cologne smells. “I thought I would see snow,” he wonders. He leans forward a bit, looks across Shiro’s broad chest and the soft looking fabric of his sweater. The sky and the highway were the same steelish blue. Beyond the road stretched long swaths of yellow grass between them and lines of buildings breaking up the horizon.

“You missed it,” Matt says. “There was a little hanging around the other day but it’s melted off.”

“There might be more before you leave,” Pidge chimes in. Keith groans as if the prospect of snow is painful, but Pidge ignores it and turns to Lance instead. “You don’t get snow in Cuba, do you?”

“Never,” and at Pidge’s curious look. “I’ve never seen snow in person.”

“It’s annoying,” Keith says.

“It’s cold and it gets in your shoes,” Pidge adds.

“Sometimes it’s hard to drive in it,” Matt says, flicking on his turn signal and heading off the highway into a smaller neighborhood.

“I don’t know,” Shiro says. Lance can feel him speaking through his ribs, in his ear and something turns in his stomach.”It’s pretty. And Yuri can’t get enough of it.” When Lance shifts in his seat the back of his head brushes Shiro’s arm and he feels the outline of muscle through Shiro’s sleeve.

Keith looks at them between the front seats and his eyes settle just behind Lance’s head in a way that makes Lance’s hackles raise. He remembers, for a second, that he’s taking Keith’s spot in Shiro’s guest bedroom. Keith looks at Shiro, then Lance, then the moment is over.

“You’re the only one here who likes slush and the smell of wet dog then,” Keith says, and turns his attention out of his window instead. Matt pulls onto a street lined with narrow houses, lined with a mix of evergreens and bare branches. Lance watches them pass by, his attention split between Christmas decorations and the way Shiro’s chest rises and falls as he breathes. Shiro taps his finger to the glass as the car rolls to a stop against the curb in front of a small, blue sided house. A tall, skinny evergreen breaks up the spread of the yard, covered in a thin spattering of fallen leaves from the neighbor’s trees, between the sidewalk and the small covered porch.

“This one’s mine,” he says. He reaches for the door handle and his smile is small and almost shy, like he isn’t sure Lance is going to approve. Then it’s gone, and Shiro opens the door and cold air rushes in over Lance. He starts shivering before he even gets a chance get out of the car. Shiro holds the door open for him and gives him the other hand to help him out. The grass crunches under his shoes and it seems oddly muffled in the cold air. Shiro closes the door and Keith rolls down his window.

“Do you want to come in?” Shiro asks. Lance creeps around behind him, wrapping his arms tight around his stomach to try and stop some of the wind cutting through his jacket and over his skin. Matt shakes his head.

“I was uh… thinking that we would run by the office with Keith and chat with the guys up there for awhile,” Matt says. Lance can tell that’s a lie from where he’s standing. Shiro huffs and reaches in to pat Keith on the arm. Keith reaches out and grips him back and when Shiro leans in to mutter something to Keith Lance feels nearly green at the gills with jealousy, so he turns and heads halfway up the yard before he remembers that he still has to get his bags out of the trunk. By the time he’s slinking back Pidge is giving him a some kind of smarmy look out the back window.

“Well, if you decide you want to come back over for dinner just let me know and I’ll find something,” Shiro says. Matt reaches under the dashboard and the trunk pops open. Lance hesitates, then pulls the trunk open and slings his smaller bag over his shoulder. He’s hauling his suitcase up before Shiro is back to help him again. The bag slips from Lance’s hands and Shiro has it set up on the grass for him. When Lance shuts the trunk and comes back to get his bag Matt waves at them.

“Have fun Lance. If he bores you too much, give me a call. We’ll come rescue you and maybe we’ll go look around the city,” Matt says. Pidge scoots to the other side of the car and nearly hits Keith in the head waving through the window. Keith doesn’t say anything, just nods to them as he rolls up the window. They watch the car pull away from the curb and disappear down the street before Lance realizes he’s alone. With Shiro. In his front yard. In a country he’s never been to before. Lance shivers. He’s not sure if it’s more from nerves or the cold.

“Is that the only jacket you packed?” Shiro asks. His fingers close gently around Lance’s wrist and Lance flinches slightly, though he doesn’t pull away.

“Uh, ya, it is,” Lance stutters. Shiro tugs gently on his wrist and Lance follows his lead towards the house. He could pull his hand back and it would sit neatly in Shiro’s palm; their fingers would lace together like nothing had ever happened. But instead he moves as Shiro turns him back to the house, lets his fingers slip from around his wrist where they brush against his own fingers and gently take his suitcase from him. They start up the walkway before Lance adds. “It’s colder than I thought it would be.”

Shiro makes this huffing laugh as he unlocks the front door with a jangle of keys. On the other side of the door a dog barks and whines as Shiro pushes her back with the side of his foot.

“Yuri?” Lance asks as he follows Shiro through the door. She’s bigger than he had thought she would be; like the effect of a winter coat since he last saw her through a webcam. At the sound of her name Yuri goes quiet, her ears trained forward so hard little wrinkles form in her forehead. To Shiro; “Can I pet her? She looks super soft.”

“Yeah, she doesn’t bite. She loves visitors,” Shiro says. As if to prove his point Yuri creeps closer, nosing into the palm of his hand until he scratches her behind the ear and sends her tail into a curly frenzy. Shiro rolls Lance’s suitcase across the living room.

“I’ll uh, I’ll put this in the guest room if you like,” he says, lingering further down the hall at the foot of a set of stairs. “You can look around as much as you like and I can…put on some tea or…” Lance sighs and pulls his bag off his shoulder. He heads down the hall towards Shiro and Yuri’s nails click on the wood floors as she follows, snuffling at his bag.

“Is it really okay for me to be here?” He comes to a stop a couple steps away from Shiro. His hand tightens around the handle of Lance’s suitcase. The other, his prosthetic, grips the knob of a door beside him. A long look lingers between them and Lance can’t read the expression crossing Shiro’s face. Yuri presses past Lance and shoves her paw in the seam of the door, whining.

“I’m happy to see you. Really,” Shiro says. He opens the door and Yuri slips in ahead of him, hopping up on the bed. They offer each other weak smiles and Shiro motions Lance into the room.

It’s a cute little bedroom, the full sized bed and the dresser taking up most of the space. Soft tan carpet. Baby blue walls decorated with posters of Earth and Galaxies and stars. Honestly, it’s not too far off from his little brother’s room, or something he would have liked as a kid.

“Yuri,” Shiro waves at the dog who’s just gotten curled up on the quilt, then points at the floor. She looks at him like he’s gone mad, but she’s well trained enough that she hops down with a dissatisfied huff, padding off down the hallway. “Sorry. Not many people come over so she acts like this is her room. This is okay?” he asks. The suitcase is set at the foot of the bed. Lance wonders in and sits on the very edge of the mattress.

“Yeah, it is,” Lance says. Shiro’s shuffling at the end of the bed, like he’s not sure if he would stay or move along. Lance scoots over a little, even though he has plenty of room on both sides. Shiro’s brows raise in surprise but ultimately he takes the bait and settles next to Lance. The silence stretches between them, their breathing the only sound. Lance watches him for several seconds and Shiro watches back. It’s the longest he’s ever just _looked_ at Shiro in person, eye to eye. He sees just how dark they are, the strong brow framing them, the bags under his eyes and the hint of stubble on his cheeks. He looks tired, and Lance’s whole body aches to press against him.

“You’re okay?” Lance asks softly. Again, that soft shift in his expression with surprise. A pause, then his head barely bobs.

“Yeah,” Shiro leans in for a second and a strange look shifts in his eyes. “What about you? Okay?” Lance can’t be sure just what he’s asking about. There’s so much. In general. Has his life been well? Is he okay at home? At work? With his friends? Is he okay being here in America? Okay with Shiro leaving him? Okay with not talking or seeing him for the last month?

“Of course,” Lance says. It’s a lie, in a way, but seeing Shiro here, he’s more okay than he’s been in a few weeks. The weight of holding himself in from reaching out for him makes his hands itch. “I missed you.” Shiro sighs, gives him a soft smile.

“I missed you too,” he says, shifts further into the bed. “I just…” His fingers knot together in his lap. “I was nervous, seeing you in the airport earlier. I’m sorry if I seemed distant-” Lance cuts him off with a shake of his head.

“Me too- I was really scared-”

“I’m happy to see you, Lance,” Shiro says. “I mean it. I never thought I would see you here. I didn’t think..” he stops short, his eyes narrowed at his fingers. Lance leans in, curious, but Shiro looks like he’s done talking.

“Hey,” he starts, scoots a little closer, until he can feel Shiro’s warmth at his side. “Can I give you a hug? It’s just that I haven’t seen you in-”

Shiro moves first, his arms looping around his waist. He turns to Lance, tugs them chest to chest. His grip is crushing; Lance has to fight him a little to hook his chin over Shiro’s shoulder. Lance tucks his hands under Shiro’s jacket and lets his fingers run over his ribs, feels the soft rise and fall of his chest as Shiro breathes.

He’s wanted this. Wanted for months. Ever since they stood together in that hotel room in Varadero almost six months ago, both of them thinking they’d never see each other again. He’s _ached_ to just hug him like this, hold him and feel his warmth, hear him breathing in his ear, through every Skype call, all the long nights just texting each other. Nothing more than images.

They hold each other for a long time, Lance running his hand up and down between Shiro’s shoulders. Shiro hums, tips his head. His lips brush Lance’s ear. Shiro squeezes him hard enough that his ribs ache, then lets him go.

“I hope you have a good time here. It’s nice to have you back.”

* * *

 

It’s only a few hours after sunset that Lance turns into bed. They had spent the evening watching sci-fi movies over mugs of coffee and sandwiches. Shiro had, sheepishly, revealed that he had a more extensive collection of sci-fi movies than he’d ever let on. He’d seemed even more thankful when Lance just thumbed through the similar collection of books in his office instead of needling him. Which, Lance didn’t know what he expected, he was into the exact same thing.

A thick book lay next to him on the bed, but Lance couldn’t read it with both his hands shoved under the blankets, tucked into his shirt and against his own belly, willing his own body heat to seep into his fingers. Before he’d left Cuba he’d looked at the weather. But seeing nightly lows of 35 on a screen is nothing compared to actually feeling it. He’s used to thinking in Celsius, and it’s turned out that t-shirts and thin sleeping pants don’t really cut it.

Lance curls up on his side, hauling an extra pillow under the blankets and tucking it against his body. It’s cold against his skin and he shivers harder until the fabric warms against him. It traps a little heat but not enough.

“Shirooo…” he whines, tucking his nose under the edge of his blanket. He has sheets and two blankets here, but it’s not enough for him. He huffs, paws around for his phone in the nest of wrinkled blankets, and turns it on.

It’s nearly midnight and Lance scoffs as he tucks his phone away again. Probably too late to wake Shiro up and gripe about the cold. It’s nothing he can help and.. He sits up, gathering the blankets around his shoulder. This is a guest bedroom. If Shiro were a real home owner he’d have at least one spare tucked away in here. Lance frowns. That means getting out of this cold little pile. But finding Shiro means the same thing. Either way he has to face the chill for a little while.

Now the question was did he sneak out or go in all at once? Lance works his hand out off the side of the bed, shivers, and decides on the swan dive approach. He rolls out of bed, and hell, even the carpet is cold on his bare toes. He whines and curses, changes his mind and takes the top quilt with him, wrapping it tight around his body.

The first stop is to his bag for his jacket and a pair of socks. That at least makes it somewhat bearable to walk around without shivering. He pulls open the dresser drawers but there’s nothing in there aside from the top drawer. In there he finds a few sweaters. He pulls one out and unfolds it. It has to be Shiro’s; it’s the perfect size for him. Lance can’t tell if it’s black or dark blue in the light.

He holds it out in front of him in both hands and the blanket around him falls to the floor. He rubs the fabric between his fingers. It’s soft, but slightly scratchy. Probably wool. Most importantly, it was warm. Lance frowns, glances at the door and wonders if he should just help himself. He stares at the door for several seconds. The entire house is silent, so Shiro must be either in his room reading or asleep.

Lance knows that Shiro is sweet. If he asked, Shiro likely wouldn’t have any problem with it. Lance could just take it off when he woke up in the morning, fold it up and put it right back where he found it. He’d just tell Shiro he was too cold in the morning and get a nice, thick blanket from him. He takes off his jacket and puts it on, lest the bulk of his jacket stretch it out.

It smells softly of wood. Like the inside of the dresser drawer. A slight disappointment settles in Lance’s chest knowing Shiro hasn’t worn this recently. The sweater hangs off of his shoulders and the hem lays high on his thighs. He shakes the sleeves back off his hands and peers into the drawer.

Under another few shirts he sees the edge of a thick manila folder, a picture frame and a few other tidbits. He stands there, considering, but then his curiosity gets the better of him. Another look towards the door and he pushes the shirts aside.

In the frame is a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from… Lance pulls it out, squints at the cursive lettering. UCLA. 2052. It’s nearly five years old. He figured Shiro had some kind of education, considering all the working or NASA stuff, but he hadn’t known where. He had to have been.. what? Barely twenty-one when he got this thing. Did he graduate early then? Lance is careful to pull the drawer out further and tuck the frame just where he found it. Why would Shiro have this framed if he’s keeping it tucked in the dresser of his guest bedroom? Wouldn’t he want to hang this up somewhere?

His attention shifts to the manila folder, held closed with a rubber band. He turns it on it’s side and it’s full of oddly shaped scraps of paper. Lance pulls back the corner, careful not to crease anything. It looks like... Lance huffs and pulls off the rubber band. The folder holds a whole stack of newspaper articles.

He sets the folder on the dresser, flips through the articles. There’s several pictures of Shiro, a couple of Keith and Matt. Nothing too interesting, considering they all work in the same field.

Then there’s an article, full page spread, one side filled with an image of a flat field flecked with something white. Wreckage, it looks like. Inset into a column of text, a small portrait of Shiro. Lance squints at the text, pulls it up closer to his face to read it in the dim light.

_Astronaut Suffers Grave Loss Upon Texas Re-Entry_

“What the hell? Astronaut?” Lance mutters to himself. He can’t read this without more light. He gathers up the articles and takes them all back to the bed. He settles in, pulls the blankets back over himself and flicks on the bedside lamp.

He spends the next hour going through all of it. The accident, Shiro’s recovery, the months he spent in physical therapy. The prosthetic donated by NASA. Keith’s graduation to full-fledged astronaut at the same ceremony Shiro retired and transferred to Ohio.

None of it is anything Lance has heard of before. Shiro never told him he’d been an astronaut. A real get-in-a-rocket-and-walk-on-the-moon astronaut. Never told him how he lost his arm. Never told him about Keith, about his friends, about his past or all the pain he’s been through.

Why? Why wouldn’t Shiro tell him any of this? Why is he here, in Shiro’s house, having gone through a full relationship with him, and he still doesn’t know all these things about his past?

Lance gathers up all the articles, sets them carefully in the folder and onto the nightstand. He turns off the lamp and sinks into the blankets again, pulling down the sweater again when it tries to bunch up around his waist.

“I’ve been a bad boyfriend,” he tells himself and the empty room. He pulls the blankets over his head to muffle his groan. The reason he didn’t know any of this is because he didn’t _ask._ He’d been too worried about stepping on a cute boy’s toes to ask him anything important. Like how he lost a limb, or all his scars, or wondered how any of that impacted his life. He told himself he loved Shiro but he didn’t know anything about him. Never bothered to try and find out.

Lance peeks out at the manila folder. Those articles only scratched the surface of a painful story. There was no way Lance could fault Shiro for never wanting to volunteer it. He couldn’t fault Shiro for wanting to cut it off with him when he never offered any proof that he really cared about him as more than a pretty face and something to brag to his family about.

But how does he bring that up? Does he just roll into the kitchen tomorrow morning all like ‘Hey, I dug through your personal belongings and dug up a painful past. Want to tell me about it?’

No, it would never go over well. He’d have to think of something else. Talk to someone else who knew everything Shiro went through. Someone who’d actually been there for him, helped him through it.

Lance heaves a heavy sigh, shooting the folder a sharp look.

He’d have to find a way to talk to Keith. Alone.


	15. The Vultures

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hopefully the length of this chapter makes up for the bit of the wait you all have had. :)
> 
> Unless I've gone crazy and totally missed Mrs. Holt's name, I've gone ahead and named her Alice.

He wakes up the next morning to sunlight in his eyes and the smell of coffee and scent of bacon filling the room. He’s amazingly warm and he can tell he’s had that kind of deep sleep that’s hard to recover from, where he feels like he’s somehow sunken into the mattress and it’s hard to extricate himself from it. Shiro must have either turned the heat up or…

Lance shifts and he feels an extra weight on him that he doesn’t remember. He pulls his nose out from under the covers, squinting into the light streaming in through the windows and looks down at himself. Yuri lies curled up in the crook of his knees, sleeping so hard her mouth hangs open a little and he hears her snoring. But she’s laying on a thick, black and gray quilt decorated with squares of starscapes and galaxies. 

He definitely didn’t have this last night. If he had, he would have fallen right to sleep-

Lance gasps and sits up so fast he jostles Yuri awake with a gruff sound. The nightstand has nothing on it but a glass of tea, still steaming. The manila folder is gone. Lance hides his face in his hands and groans. 

“Yuri. Please, just put me out of my misery,” he says, his words muffled in the sleeves of his sweater. He wants to cry. Lance hasn’t even gotten out of bed and Shiro’s already done so much to make him comfortable. He can only imagine Shiro coming in, cup of tea in hand and seeing that manila folder right there on the nightstand, full of all the things he was never comfortable enough to share with Lance himself. He has to try and fix this. He pulls back the quilt and gets out of bed. Grabbing the tea, he opens the door and heads towards the kitchen. 

Lance pads down the hall and pauses in the doorway to the kitchen. Shiro stands at the stove dressed in a tight fitting t-shirt and a pair of jeans, pushing a few strips of bacon around in a sizzling pan. He’s already got so much going on and, Lance squints at the time on the microwave, it’s hardly 8 o’ clock. A carton of eggs sits on the counter next to Shiro and several pieces of bacon are already done. A steaming kettle rests on another burner and everything needed for tea is on the dining room table, along with a pot of coffee and places set for two. 

It’s disgusting, in a special way that makes Lance’s chest warm and spread to the tips of his fingers. But at the same time he’s acutely aware of the fact that he’ll never be able to keep up with Shiro. He’s just rolled out of bed and Shiro’s already showered and dressed with breakfast on the table. 

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were getting a couple kids ready for school,” Lance says. He goes to the table and sets his tea down at one of the settings. Shiro’s shoulders tighten and relax again so quickly Lance almost misses it before Shiro glances at him with a small smile. His eyes flick down, do a double take and Lance realizes he’s forgotten to take the sweater off. He lingers by the table,  tracing his fingers around the rim of his mug. “Do you need help?”

“No, I’m almost done,” Shiro says with a shake of his head. He flips the bacon out of the pan and with the other strips already finished. “How do you want your eggs?” 

“I don’t like eggs much,” Lance admits, then when Shiro starts looking around. “I’ll eat some bacon though.”

“I have fruit too,” Shiro says. “It’s on the bar.” He points to a bowl and Lance takes the small distraction, picking out a banana and an orange and setting them on his plate. “Did you sleep okay?” Lance thinks about being cold, the sweater, searching the dresser and the manila folder he’d left on the nightstand but had since disappeared. 

“Uhm, yeah,” Lance starts and takes his seat at the table. He pushes his sleeves up and starts cutting into the orange peel with a butterknife. “I don’t think I realized how cold it would be up here. I was freezing last night but it was so late I didn’t know if you had gone to sleep yet or not. I didn’t want to wake you up just to turn the heat on or something. So,” Lance peels the orange in neat quarters while Shiro cracks a couple of eggs into the leftover bacon grease in his pan to pop and crackle.”I borrowed one of your sweaters. Sorry about that.”

“I don’t mind,” Shiro says. He’s already taking the eggs out of the pan and Lance takes a mental note that he must like his eggs runny. “I’ll turn the heat up tonight, and you don’t have to worry about waking me up. To be honest I forgot I even had stuff in there, so it’s not like you’re taking anything right out of my hands. I think that sweater has too much static for me anyways. It messes up my arm.” 

Lance chews the inside of his lip as Shiro grabs his own plate and the plate of bacon and brings it to the table. He settles in his chair, offers Lance the bacon first (he takes two) and takes a sip of his coffee. 

“Thanks for letting me borrow it then,” Lance says. He pulls the sections of orange apart, thinks that it’s one of those good navel oranges and not one of those smaller ones with too much pith. “About that folder…” He can’t just take Shiro’s edging around the subject, and he could never relax if he just brushed it under the rug and left it hanging between them. That’s what he had come up here for, wasn’t it? To clear all this dirty air between them so they could just go back to enjoying each other’s company.

He wanted to love Shiro without the curtain of his past hanging between them. 

“You looked in it?” Shiro asks. Lance has to physically fight the urge to sink back into his chair. It feels like a cramp in his belly. He bites his cheek, pops a section of orange into his mouth and nods minutely. 

“I’m sorry. I didn’t,” Lance sighs after he swallows. He fiddles with another section between his fingers. “I didn’t realize what it was and…”

“It’s okay,” Shiro cuts him off, but he stops cutting up his eggs and stares not at Lance, but into his coffee cup. Lance’s heart twists strangely beneath his ribs at the tone of Shiro’s voice. Not angry, but something sad and cowed. “I don’t know why I keep that stuff anyways.” 

That’s wrong. It’s  _ wrong  _ how Shiro thinks he has to hide it. How it’s something that clearly such a big part of himself but also something he hides in a drawer in his guest bedroom. Something he can’t bear to look at it. It hurts Lance, not only because of how deeply Shiro’s entrenched in his own head, but also because Lance wants to know what’s in there. He  _ needs  _ to know this part of Shiro. This part of him that’s such a mystery that fuels all his little twists and turns and moods and relationships. 

“You should though, shouldn’t you? I mean it’s not good to just push that stuff back and-” Shiro sets his hand on Lance’s arm just below his elbow and squeezes him lightly. Lance goes quiet at the look in Shiro’s eyes. They scream  _ ‘Not yet,’.  _ It feels like they look at each other for an hour in silence before Lance breaks first and looks away to occupy himself with his tea. 

“Everyone wants to meet us at the mall in a few hours. You wanna go? The one they’re going to is really nice,” Shiro says. His tone is completely different. Faked happiness. He’s blatantly changing the subject again. Lance grinds his teeth, irritated that Shiro won’t just talk to him. But at the same time he can’t imagine it not being a sore subject, so he doesn’t force it and pushes it to the back of his mind.

“Who all’s coming?” He asks. Shiro hums around a mouthful of bacon and swallows.

“Everyone you met yesterday. So Matt, Pidge, and Keith. Their parents might come to, but they’re sweet. I’m sure you’ll like them,” he said, but Lance was only listening with half an ear. Maybe he could find Keith on his own.

* * *

 

It wasn’t like Varadero didn’t have it’s own sense of grandeur to it. His home town was, ultimately, a tourist destination and with it came all those big hotels and restaurants and sprawling properties butting right up on the beach. But, as Shiro turns into a parking garage and takes a ticket at the entrance, Lance feels claustrophobia creeping down the back of his neck. 

“It’s getting pretty close to Christmas so everyone’s out,” Shiro says when he glances over at Lance. He must have noticed Lance fighting the urge to sink lower into his seat. Shiro’s crawling the car through the parking garage so slowly it seems like he’s not going to clear the next ramp but even then it feels too fast. The ceilings are too low and all the cars are too close together. 

“Even if we find a spot, can you park? What if I can’t get out and ding up the car next to me trying?” Lance asks, then after a beat. “Doesn’t anyone take a bus around here?”

“America doesn’t like public transport too much,” Shiro says, turning up another ramp. Lance watches a huge number six pass by the window and wonders if they’re nearing the top. “I don’t think we’ve figured it out yet.”

“Everyone’s got a car then,” Lance says. He’s finally starting to see some open spots but Shiro passes them by for a spot closer to the end of the row, where there’s two open spots right next to each other. It feels tight and Lance tenses up a little as Shiro parks, but he must be used to this because the car lines up with hardly a second thought. Lance has a full empty spot on his side to open his door as wide as he wants to.

“I promise it’s just worse because of Christmas. Everyone comes into town to shop,” he says, putting the car in park and turning it off. He doesn’t move, so Lance doesn’t follow him. Shiro looks at him and Lance watches back as he eases his seatbelt off. The atmosphere seems to change from something casual to something a little more intense. Lance sits up straighter, turns to Shiro because maybe he’s thinking the same thing. It’s so simple, just going to a mall, riding in a car together and talking about stupid things like public transport. Easy domesticity that they could never really have long distance.

“Is that your only jacket?” Shiro asks. He reaches out and fiddles with the tab of his zipper before he lets it drop and his prosthetic chills the backs of Lance’s fingers where their hands meet on the center console. 

That’s what he was thinking? Lance sighs and pushes open the door. Cold air rushes inside and he’s shivering in a matter of seconds. 

“Yeah. I don’t really need anything heavier in Varadero. It’s totally different up here,” Lance says. He meets Shiro on the other side of the car and lets him lead them towards a set of stairs. In Cleveland the cold was like a wild animal. He’d known that mild chill in Cuba where the jacket he wore now was more often than not plenty enough. Here, it was a kind of cold that tears through his jacket entirely, right down and underneath his skin and into his gut. It feels like he might have well have jumped outdoors straight out of the shower. 

“You want to look for a coat while you’re here?” Shiro asks. He lets Lance go ahead of him down the stairs, but points towards a hall that offshoots from a landing a few flights down. At the end is a fancy glass door and through it Lance can see the gleam of blue lights and a few people milling around.

“Not really,” Lance admits. “Not if I’m only going to be here for a few days.” The admission sends a creeping feeling down his spine. He can’t waste his time here. He opens the door and warm air washes over him. 

He’d seen pictures of American shopping malls before, but nothing like this. The first thing he does once inside is wander over to the railing and look down. They’ve come into the mall in a back hall on the third floor. There aren’t so many people up there with them, but down on the first floor the place is crowded. The floor seems to crawl with people, everyone carrying shopping bags, many still bundled up against the cold outside simply because their hands are full. He can hardly pick out the little bundles of families they’re so crowded together and mixed in all the business. 

But the decorations are something else. The blue he’d seen outside were from what seemed like miles of string lights hanging from the vaulted ceiling down the entire length of the open middle area. Everyone downstairs is crowded around a gigantic Christmas tree, covered in tinsel and lights and massive ball ornaments in red and gold and green. The whole mall smells faintly of clean pine. 

“You think that’s a real tree?” Lance asks when Shiro joins him at the railing. Lance turns his head and watches a line of children waiting for their turn to speak with the Santa sitting at the foot of the tree. Shiro chuckles. 

“I really doubt it. Too many needles to sweep up and people with allergies.”

They find Matt, Pidge, Keith, and an older couple looking remarkably like the result of splitting Matt into two separate people, in the food court. They’re all sitting around two small tables shoved together. When Lance sees Keith sitting as an offshoot to the neat little square the Holts make, he looks for all the world like an unhappy step child sulking into his cola. As they approach Shiro nudges him towards the older couple with a hand on his side with such a light touch Lance nearly wants to squirm away, ticklish. 

“Sam, Alice,” Shiro starts. He speaks to them like Lance would address his grandmother when he’s trying to behave so he automatically straightens his spine and tries to make himself seem presentable and happy, but not  _ too  _ comfortable to be there. “This is Lance. I’m sure Matt’s already told you he’s visiting for a few days from Cuba.” Lance shakes each of their hands in turn and sweetly says his hellos. Matt and Pidge seem tickled by the little uptight display, but Keith is watching him much more coolly. 

“You’re not freezing in that jacket, are you?” Alice asks as Shiro and Lance take their seats. Lance across from Keith, who hardly looks at him, because Shiro sits beside him and that’s all, apparently, Keith has eyes for. Lance tries to keep the rational part of his mind in check. There’s nothing wrong with his ex-boyfriend wanting to sit next to a friend he hasn’t seen in awhile. 

“Ah, yeah. But only when I’m outside,” Lance says with a gentle prod from Pidge, whose chair is nearly obscured by the thick coat spread over the back of it. “As long I don’t go out, I’m perfectly fine.” The whole table seems to find that pretty funny, even though he hadn’t really been trying to joke. Who wants to stay outside here when the cold bites right through your skin?

“I suppose Cuba is pretty nice all year?” Sam adds.

“Well, this is the only jacket I’ve ever needed. It almost never drops below fifteen degrees,” he doesn’t realize he’s given the temperature in Celsius until Alice nudges her husband with her elbow, a clear sign to translate. 

“About sixty Fahrenheit,” Matt supplies. Lance appreciates his ability to figure that in his head in a few seconds and supposes it’s probably something to do with his career. “It’s supposed to get around ten degrees tonight, but I think in America it’s something completely different to what you’re used to.” 

“Is it colder than what it is right now?” Lance asks. Pidge laughs, and Lance tries to ignore Shiro’s almost pitying look. 

“A little bit,” Sam says. “Before we go home tonight we were talking about stopping and picking up water and extra candles. It’s supposed to snow quite a bit tonight. Have you ever seen snow?” Lance is already shivering at the thought. 

“Only in pictures…”

They talk on like that for quite awhile and Lance finds that he quite likes all the Holts. Matt and Pidge had both struck him has very smart, but their father was something different entirely, and their mother warm and kind. They touched on subjects from science to culture to politics and even though Lance feels half lost sometimes he comes away feeling a bit more cultured for it. He can easily tell why Shiro is so smitten with them. 

They all break apart in their own directions when Lance mentions that, since he’s here, he wants to look for souvenirs for his family. He’s lost pretty much as soon as he leaves the food court and, despite Shiro offering to come with him, he turns him down. As much as he wants to explore this place with Shiro, he knows this is his best chance to find Keith on his own.

* * *

 

It feels like hours of wandering around this mall, getting lost, poking into stores, people watching, before he finally sees Keith again. He finds him sitting in an armchair in a secluded seating area towards one end of the mall, away from the tree and the food court and thus most of the crowd. Lance considers himself lucky for both finding Keith before he ran into anyone else and finding Keith alone. Lance hitches his shopping bag, a gift for Shiro, further up his arm and makes his way over, settling into an empty seat next to him. Keith glances up from whatever he’s typing on his phone. 

“Hey,” he says. A pause to read something. Lance fights to get the bag off his arm in a mess of crinkling plastic and tucks it safely between his shoes. 

“Uh, hey, Keith,” Lance starts. He leans back in his chair and crosses one leg over the other, sinking into his jacket. “I’m glad I caught you by yourself.” Another glance from Keith. 

“Yeah?” Keith asks. He’s still typing. “You don’t want to go find Shiro instead?” Lance stiffens, caught between two different responses. His first thought is that Keith is teasing him somehow, or making some kind of comment on his relationship simply because that seems like the kind of person Keith would be. But his tone is somewhat too genuine for that. Like he really thinks Lance would prefer to be around Shiro just because he knows him better. Lance squashes down offense and shrugs. 

“Not right now. I wanted to talk to you about him,” Lance admits. That gives Keith pause and he stops typing, though he doesn’t put down his phone. “I thought maybe you would help me get to know him better.”

“Didn’t you guys date for awhile?” Keith asks. Now there’s that incredulous tone Lance had almost responded to a few seconds ago. He scowls. 

“Yeah, but it’s not like Cuba is right around the corner. I’ve been worried about him, but I haven’t been able to figure it out,” Lance says. Keith leans back in his chair and lets out a slow breath. When he doesn’t say anything Lance continues. “Matt invited me up here. Shiro didn’t know I was coming and- Look, Keith. This stuff is a secret okay? I don’t want Shiro knowing I’m talking about our relationship problems to his friends behind his back.”

“Between us,” Keith says, amused. “He didn’t know you were coming up here? That’s pretty sneaky, isn’t it?” Lance frowns because that’s been nagging him since he came up here; that he’s imposing too much on Shiro by surprise. 

“Yeah but-” Lance starts, flustered. “I mean it. I was really worried about him. We broke up almost a month ago and I haven’t been able to talk to him since. Not until I came up here.” Keith’s brows disappear under his fringe, but somehow he still manages to look bored. 

“Really? That’s kind of weird, I guess.” Lance nods. 

“Look, I just want to know if you’ll fill me in on some stuff I can’t get out of Shiro. I just wanna-” he gets caught up, motioning in the air with his hands. “I just wanna  _ talk  _ to him but I don’t know where to start. I feel like I know him but then it’s like, I don’t?” 

“Is it about his arm?” Keith asks, cutting Lance’s train of thought off. “Did he tell you about it?” Lance shakes his head. 

“That’s the thing. He never did and-” 

“You didn’t think to ask him?” Keith offers. The question cuts into Lance and a cold sliver of irritation skitters over the back of his neck. He gives Keith a sharp look. 

“I did, okay? I thought about it a lot. I’ve  _ been _ thinking about it but,” he huffs. “I didn’t know how. Sometimes when I thought about asking him it felt rude, and other times something little would happen and he would just seem like- He just seemed kind of depressed and I never knew for sure if it’s because of something that happened to him or, you know, it’s just the way he was.” He thinks of some of those little instances, things Shiro would do or say that would make Lance want nothing more to just reach out and hug him but, because of the distance between them, he’d felt it was better to just leave it be. Maybe that hadn’t been the best choice. 

Keith doesn’t respond to that right away. Instead he rests his cheek in his hand and squeaks his boot on the tile floor. Silence hangs between them for several seconds and Lance watches a couple come out of a store beside them, hand in hand. 

“So what do you want from me?” Keith finally asks. Lance considers, briefly, if he should tell Keith about the manila folder he’d found. He already knows, in snippets, what happened. Shiro crashed a few years ago, lost his arm and transferred from Texas to Ohio. Keith had, supposedly, become an astronaut in Shiro’s place when he’d been forced to retire and take up a new career in research. 

Somehow, Lance doesn’t think that Keith would be the kind of person who would appreciate knowing that Lance had, maliciously or not, snooped into a friend’s things. Helped himself to his secrets. No. Shiro already knows about it, and that’s enough. Maybe Keith didn’t even know Shiro had kept all those objective and unfeeling snippets of a past life hidden in a dresser drawer along with spare sweaters and a college degree.

“I just want someone to fill in some of the gaps,” Lance says. “It seems like everyone here knows something I don’t and I feel like it’s rude to ask if he doesn’t want to just offer it himself.” Keith looks at him. Really looks at him, in a way that makes Lance feel like he’s on the wrong end of an interrogation. Keith is sizing him up, considering if he’s worth whatever he has to say. 

“I went to college with him,” Keith says. “I was a couple years behind him, but we were in the same degree program so we always wound up in the same places. He’s always been super nice and social and a natural leader so all of that is accurate.” Lance pouts lightly. The rest then, is not. The depression and secrecy and second guessing and the subtle way he would put himself down. Those were all new for Shiro.

“So what happened?” and then, because he figures he can get away with already knowing. “He was an astronaut, wasn’t he?” Keith nods. 

“Yeah. Up until a few years ago. I don’t know how much you know about what we do but he used to go up to the ISS-” To Lance’s curious look; “The International Space Station. He went up there several times. Last time was a few years ago.” 

“That’s when…” Lance thinks of that yellowed image in that folder back in Shiro’s home. That long line of bright white debris scattered in a field. Keith hums. 

“The parachutes malfunctioned and he was a few miles off course besides. He was supposed to land just offshore in the Gulf of Mexico but he wound up in someone’s ranch instead. The shuttle didn’t hold together very well so all the… the scars and stuff, is from shrapnel. It took them too long to get to him after he crashed so he... That’s how he lost his arm,” Keith says. Quiet settles between them when Lance doesn’t want to prod him for more quite so hard. 

“So he couldn’t go up anymore?” he asks. The question makes him feel ignorant. He doesn’t know the first thing about space travel but even he can figure out that the people who are chosen to go into orbit have to be in the best physical and mental shape. He knows perfectly well that Shiro doesn’t meet either of those requirements. 

“No. He had to retire,” Keith sighs. “It really sucks but it’s not like they just left him for dead. Everyone at NASA pitched in and donated his prosthetic and helped him pay for therapy and stuff,” Lance can’t help but notice that he doesn’t elaborate if said therapy is solely physical or not. “It was pretty easy for him to get a job doing research up here.” Keith shrugs. “That’s what I’m doing up here now. Helping them test some projects they’ve been working on lately. He’s pretty much doing the same thing he was before, just… on the other side, I guess.” 

“They hired you to make trips up instead?” Lance asks. 

“Well, yeah. I was barely out of school when all that happened so I jumped on the chance. There’s not very many people who get to go out there. Everyone was applying for his spot almost before the news of his crash went public. It’s really competitive,” Keith explains. On one hand, Lance can understand. Being an astronaut is lucrative, something only the smallest handful of people get to experience.  Lance can’t blame Keith for putting his own application in, but at the same time it’s cutthroat in a way that turns his stomach. Keith dropping by the office to drop off his resume on his way to visit Shiro in the hospital. He thinks of those National Geographic shows he would sometimes watch. Of vultures lingering around a wounded animal before its even had a chance to die.

“Aren’t you scared of the same thing happening to you?” Lance asks. Keith only shrugs. His phone buzzes where it rests on his thigh but he doesn’t move to pick it up. 

“Of what? Crashing, or someone replacing me?” 

“Either, I guess. If something like that happened to one of my friends, I don’t think I would have the nerve to just strap myself in and do the same thing that got him hurt,” Lance admits. Once, when he was a kid, he and his brother had seen a shark lurking around in the water while they were swimming. Even though it had been harmless in the end, Lance never wandered further than knee deep into the ocean the rest of the summer. Keith hardly seems bothered and checks his phone.

“It’s different when it’s something you’ve been dreaming of, I guess,” he says. He taps something short into his phone and turns his attention back to Lance. “Is that all you need? Matt said everyone’s meeting up to watch a movie if you’re done looking around.” Lance straightens up in his chair, a bit surprised.

“Uh, yeah. I guess. I mean, I guess that explains a lot about how Shiro is sometimes, the whole ‘something you’ve been dreaming about’ thing. Shiro was the same way?” he asks. Keith gives him this wistful little smile and stands from his chair, stretching his arms above his head. 

“I think he still is, honestly.”


	16. Hand It Over

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My goal was to have Saltwater done by the season 2 premier. That didn't happen, but I got like two 4k chapters out this week so I'm happy enough. That's blowing my usual daily writing goals out of the water. 
> 
> I sincerely hope you guys like this chapter. I felt like I was running around with a box of band aids like 'This is good, right? It doesn't sound weird? Sappy? Stupid?' But in the end I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.
> 
> So, there's only one more chapter left. I'm gonna wrap some stuff up, give you guys a little more smut and an epilogue and i'll finally be able to say I finished a longfic. I've got like, several things planned for it so give me a little bit of time, but I'm looking forward to it! Then I've finally got to get my claws into some smaller things and my next bigger project, whatever that ends up being.

“You’re absolutely sure everything’s fine,” Lance asks, hefting the bag of dog food onto his hip. He holds his hands out for one of the gallon jugs of water from Shiro. He gets one, but Shiro insists on taking two himself in one hand and an armful of groceries. Lance sighs, tries to ignore the hard bulge of muscle in Shiro’s biceps, and follows Shiro to the front door. 

It was nearing dark by the time everyone was filing out of the movie at the mall, said their goodbyes and went their own ways. On the way home Shiro had dropped by a grocery store. He’d bought dog food, a few days worth of nonperishable groceries, and a worrying amount of water. Then a stop by a gas station to fill up a couple of jerrycans he’d had stored in the trunk. Both places were crowded with others buying much the same things.

“I promise, there’s nothing to worry about. This,” Shiro says, tipping his head towards the bags as he slips the plastic handles down his wrist so he has a hand free to unlock the door. Yuri barks, once, from somewhere inside the house. “Is mostly just me being paranoid. Storms like this come often enough that we know how to deal with them.”

Lance frowns deeply and follows Shiro into the house. He stays in and starts putting up the groceries while Shiro gets the rest of the water out of the car, and stores the full jerrycans in the tiny shed that sits in his backyard. He isn’t about to go out into that cold again unless he absolutely has to. Seeing all those people in the grocery store, all their carts loaded with the same staples, reminds him too much of the tropical storms that would whirl their way along the coast. They would whip up the sea into an angry froth, tearing out power lines just as easily as fronds from trees. A big storm could send much of the island into darkness and it would be days of sticky humidity and rationing water he’d saved up in the bathtub and sinks beforehand before the power would come back on. 

So he doesn’t quite trust Shiro when he comes in through the back door and scratches Yuri behind the ear like nothing’s going on. Needless to say, he’s never been in the kind of cold that requires a nest of blankets even with the heat on. He’s worried about going without it for who knows how long. Shiro helps him put up the rest of the groceries and then starts digging in closets for flashlights, extra blankets, and what seems like a hundred other little things that he stores in a corner of the living room in a neat space. 

“You usually stay this prepared?” Lance asks as he wanders over. Shiro gathers a handful of candles and starts to set them strategically around the house, each with a pack of matches beside it. It seems a bit overkill, considering Shiro lives on his own. He hardly thinks Yuri needs more than an extra blanket or two and a store of water. Especially if Shiro’s got a generator somewhere. 

“I can’t stand not to be,” Shiro admits. He gives Lance a somewhat sheepish look as he comes out of the laundry room and heads upstairs with more candles. He must notice the worried furrow in Lance’s brow because he pauses for him at the head of the stairs. “I really don’t think the power is going to go out. And if it does, I  _ really  _ doubt it’ll be out for long. I just don’t want it to be a worst case scenario and something bad happens to you because I didn’t do the small things like this.”

“You’re really too much.” The inner romantic in Lance wells up at the soft wrinkles under Shiro’s eyes, the careful, almost anxious way he moves from room to room, setting out candles and packs of matches until every possible room has a source of light, preparation for a catastrophe that might not even come.

* * *

 

Despite enough extra blankets to impede his breathing and a relatively hefty dog curled up at the small of his back, Lance wakes up early. His feet are so cold that his toes are stinging-going-on-numb. A chill is creeping up around his hips and down his shoulders, right for his core and he shivers under the blankets. 

For several seconds he just lays there, listening to Yuri snore, blinking into the pitch dark under his nest of blankets before he pokes his head out and looks around the room. 

Well, he thought he’d done that. But under the blankets and above look much the same. He squints into the dark but all he can make out is the lump of his own body and the slighter one of Yuri just beside him. The cold is penetrating, prickling at his nose and cheeks. He can’t just stay here and shiver. He figures that out pretty quickly. He thinks he’ll just up and die frozen and stiff like some kind of pitiful Han Solo, or that guy at the end of The Shining. 

Lance braces himself for the chill and tosses the blankets off onto the dog, who wakes up with a grumpy little sound. The cold immediately digs in through his clothes. He shivers, paws for the switch on the lamp. He rolls the switch twice in one direction, then in the other, but there’s nothing. Groping for his phone, he turns it on instead. 

It’s five in the morning and, despite being plugged in, it’s not charging. Lance turns the phone towards the bed and Yuri squints back at him, only her head visible in the lump of blanket. 

“I think the power is out,” he tells her. So that explains why it’s so cold. It must have gone out not too long after he’d gone to sleep. He slips his phone into the pocket of his jacket and takes up the maglight Shiro gave him before he’d gone to bed. He pads to his suitcase, puts on another shirt, a second pair of sweats, socks and a large, thick coat Shiro had loaned him. It’s far too big on him, but it’s lined deep with fleece and it traps heat just as well as if it generated it itself. He shoves his hands in the pockets and something small crinkles in the left one. With the flashlight Lance finds it’s a set of hand warmers. He spends a couple seconds pondering over them. He’s never had to use them before and he wonders how well they work, or if they’re even new. Well, he doesn’t need them quite yet, so he puts them away. 

Suitably prepared, he spends a couple minutes coaxing Yuri out of the bed so he can gather up the blankets and make his way to the living room to bunker up on the couch and see what’s going on.

Despite the early hour, the living room is somewhat better lit than his bedroom. The curtains are thinner and all the windows seem to glow with a soft, white light. Lance frowns and drags his blankets over to the couch. He piles everything, including Yuri, onto the couch, nesting in before he pulls back the curtains and peers through the blinds. 

Five in the morning, but the world outside glows in a sliver of moonlight. The clouds are spotty in places but snow drifts down in thick puffs that look like loosely knit cotton balls. Thousands, millions of flakes fall, but they never seem to add to the mass covering the ground. They just meld together and disappear. The ground , the street, cars, trees, everything’s covered in a deep layer of soft white, flat except where drifts have gathered against the sides of houses.

Everything looks muted and scrubbed clean. There’s no detail anywhere. Nothing but this broad, bright white plain between him and all the houses across the street. An indescribable urge to go out and break up that expanse with footprints is almost overwhelming. Lance chuckles to himself.

“I’d freeze to death before I got off the front por-” 

Something clatters across the floor upstairs, sending Lance’s heart up into the back of his throat. He flinches, looks towards the ceiling. He can hear Shiro get out of bed, a few loud, fast steps. Then he starts to pace, back and forth above him. While Lance stares, Yuri fights her way out from under a quilt and hops off the couch to make her way down the hall and up the stairs, her tail hanging loosely behind her. 

Lance isn’t quite sure what to do. He can hear Shiro still pacing, slower now, but showing no signs of stopping.Then, faintly, he hears Yuri scratch at the door, but if Shiro hears her, he makes no sign of it. 

Lance sits there thinking what he should do about this. Then Yuri scratches on the door again, and Shiro again ignores her and Lance kicks the blankets off himself and heads towards the stairs. Yuri clearly knows what to do, and he’s not about to let Shiro’s dog outdo him. 

Yuri gives him this worried little look when he tops the stairs, her forehead wrinkled between her ears. She looks him in the eye and taps her nails on the door again. 

“I know, let’s see if we can sort him out,” Lance says. He knocks lightly on the door. “Shiro?” Inside, the footsteps stop, start up again, then he hears the soft squeak of the mattress as Shiro sits down. 

“You can come in,” Shiro says. “It’s not locked.” Even so, Lance hesitates slightly, and when he does press open the door, he does it slow, peeking in.

The room is dark enough that he has a hard time seeing what’s going on. He squints into the dark, finds the shape of Shiro sitting on the foot of the bed. Yuri presses past Lance and pads over to Shiro, nudging her nose into his palm. 

“Good morning, baby,” Shiro coos to her softly, smoothing back her ears and digging his fingers into his fur. He turns to Lance as he steps into the room and leaves the door open so he can see. “I’m sorry if I woke you up.”

“Are you okay?” Lance asks. If he looks close he can see Shiro’s chest rising and falling, deep and measured. He’s thinking about it, about keeping his breaths so even, Lance realizes. “You sounded pretty uncomfortable.”

“Yeah I-” Shiro starts. His breathing stutters, but his hand rubs Yuri’s neck. “It’s just a nightmare. If it’s too dark I tend to have them. I shouldn’t have closed the curtains last night if I thought the power was going to go out.” Lance picks his way further into the room. On the far side of the bed the shape of a lamp and a couple other things are knocked off the nightstand and into the floor. 

“It’s okay,” Lance says. He squints, looks around the room, but it’s too dark for his tastes. “I’m gonna open the curtains,” he says. He makes his way over to the window and pulls back the curtains. The room fills with more of that strangely bright moonlight that comes off the snow. 

He turns back to Shiro and finds the collar of his shirt damp with sweat, his forehead beaded with more. Lance frowns deeply, looking around. Shiro only glances at him shyly while Yuri paws at his ankle. Lance looks around the room. There’s an unopened bottle of water on the floor among the rest of the scattered mess. Lance takes a few moments to gather everything up. Rights the lamp, sets the books back into a neat pile, Shiro’s phone put safely beside them. He takes the bottle of water to the bathroom, gets a washcloth out of the cupboard and wets it in the sink, bringing it and the now half full bottle back to Shiro. 

“Alright,” Lance says, taking a seat besides him on the bed and presses the water into his hand. Shiro weighs it, makes sure the lid is on tight and sets it to the side, uninterested. “Honest,  _ tigre _ , what’s happening?” He hasn’t called him that in a long time and thinks back to when Shiro would come into his shop, looking like he didn’t know if he were supposed to be there. The nickname had been a way for Lance to try and pull him out of his shell.

“I wasn’t lying,” Shiro says. Lance dabs the damp cloth on his temple, slowly and meticulously wiping away beads of sweat. Shiro doesn’t pull away or even shiver at the chill, but he doesn’t look at Lance either. He keeps staring at Yuri as he pets her. She sits patiently and close by and Lance wonders if she’s trained for it or just used to this. “It really is just a nightmare. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you come up here.” 

“Stop being so sorry for everything.” Lance pokes him firmly in the wrinkle between his brow with a cloth covered finger. “So tell me about it. Whenever I have nightmares I always feel better if I tell someone.” Shiro sighs and rubs Yuri’s ear between his fingers while she yawns. 

“You don’t want to hear about it.” Another poke, this time in the cheek, then Lance trails the wet cloth over his jaw and back of his neck. 

“Two things,” Lance starts. He pouts but his voice his firm. He’s not putting up with any weaseling today. “First, don’t tell me what I want and don’t want. Second, you’re not helping yourself with this,” Lance sits up straight pulls his knees under himself so he can sit eye to eye with Shiro. “You’re not feeling well and I’m not so stupid that I can’t see that it’s all in here,” he says. He brushes his fingers through the short hair at the back of his head. 

“I’m okay,” Shiro says. He glances at Lance and he must see Lance’s mind screaming bullshit at him, though Lance doesn’t say anything. He rubs his eyes and leans over his knees. “What do you want to know Lance?” 

“Why you can’t tell me anything,” Lance says. He drapes the cloth over the back of Shiro’s neck and tries to knead some of the tension out of his muscles. “It’s not like… I know what happened to you.” Shiro sags and Lance rubs his back. “And I’m sorry about that. I shouldn’t have snooped but-” 

“I already told you it’s okay. You didn’t know what was in it and I really don’t think you came up here just to do an impromptu background check on me,” Shiro says. Lance spreads his fingers across Shiro’s back, feeling the slight dampness in the fabric where he’s been sweating. Beneath his ribs, his heart beats steadily, but too hard. 

“Your nightmares always get you this nervous?” Lance looks back at the now righted, but crooked lamp, the tangled blankets.

“No. Only when I sleep and it’s too quiet, or too dark or something,” Lance nods. Check and check. So no wonder. “It’s- It’s not even like that- that shuttle but for some reason…” 

Lance hardly knows what he’s talking about, but his heart aches all the same. There’s no way he can know anything of what Shiro’s experienced. He’s never even  _ seen  _ one of those shuttles astronauts use on reentry. He doesn’t know what it looks like, doesn’t know how tight and cramped the thing must be when it’s working fine, much less when it’s all smashed to pieces around someone. But, looking in Shiro’s eyes, he knows. He knows it’s something horrifying. It’s something that haunts him. Despite years and 1,500 miles, it sticks with him. 

“It’s nothing you can help,” Lance says. His hand rubs steadily across Shiro’s shoulders. “When I’m sad, my grandma always tells me that bad stuff sticks better than good stuff. Our minds are just wired like that,” Lance says. Shiro hums, pondering Yuri as she curls up on the floor by his feet.

“We think it’s a survival thing. If we remember what hurts us, we can avoid it in the future,” Shiro says. Lance takes up the washcloth again and brushes it over the back of his neck. He sees goosebumps raise on Shiro’s skin, but he doesn’t show any signs of being too cold. “It hasn’t been useful since we had to worry about fighting off lions in the middle of the night.”

“We can’t help what sticks with us. We all do it,” Lance squeezes Shiro’s shoulder lightly and leans forward, trying to meet his eyes. “It’s nothing we can judge each other for.” Shiro bites the inside of his cheek, flexes and opens his prosthetic.

“I keep thinking I’ll get used to it,” Shiro says. His voice is soft, tentative. “The scars, and the fake arm. But then I’ll see myself in the mirror, or some kid on the street will give me a funny look or- or someone will ask me why I look so beat up and all of it comes back.” Shiro’s next breath is a little shaky around the edges. 

“People are curious,” Lance says. “Kids, they don’t have filters. People say things before they think about it and-” 

“They just say the first thing that comes to mind?” Shiro answers for him. Lance is quiet, and it’s almost like he can read Shiro’s mind.  _ The first thing anyone notices are the scars.  _

“I’m sorry,” Lance says. A feeling of helplessness settles in his chest. Those same things are among the first thing he noticed about Shiro too, when he first wandered into his shop some six months ago. He doesn’t know what to say to make it better, if there even is such a thing. It doesn’t mean much to pipe up with  _ ‘Yeah, but  _ I  _ think you’re perfect.’  _ That’s bullshit he’d feed to a depressed kid when he can’t win a spelling bee. 

“What kind of grown man has a panic attack just because the power goes out? Because it’s too dark?” Shiro cuts him off. He covers his eyes with his hand. “Why does it have to be like this? Why do  _ I  _ have to be like this?” Lance shakes him lightly, feels Shiro shivering under his hands. 

“Listen to me-” 

“Why can’t I just get over it?”

“Shiro!” Lance reaches out, grips Shiro’s wrist and leads it away. His palm is wet, but Lance forces himself not to pause. He only plucks the washcloth off Shiro’s shoulder and presses it into his hand. Shiro holds it hard to his eyes, the other gripping a handful of his sweats with whiteknuckle strength. 

“I shouldn’t be like this,” Shiro sniffles. “I shouldn’t have this side of me that I have to hide. It’s been  _ years _ , Lance. I’m jumping around like it happened last week!” Shiro lets out a deep breath, bites his lip hard. “How can you have any respect for a guy who barely manages to keep himself together?”

Hearing Shiro talk about himself like this only makes Lance want to slap him upside the head and yell ‘What’s wrong with you!’ but instead he scoots closer and rests his head on Shiro’s shoulder, slipping his arm under Shiro’s and holding it close to his chest. 

“Listen to me.”

“Lance…” Shiro takes the cloth away from his eyes and squeezes it hard. “You don’t have to. I’m just-”

“No. I mean it. Really, really listen to me okay?” Lance says. He pinches Shiro on the tender spot on the inside of his arm until he flinches. “Every word. Because it’s important.”

“Okay.” 

“I. Don’t. Care.” Lance starts. Emphasis on every word. Shiro stiffens along his side, but Lance holds onto his arm tight, keeping him trapped. “I don’t care that you’ve got this baggage with you.”

“Lance-” 

“Shut up!” Lance lifts his head and pins Shiro with his stare. “Don’t open your mouth again until I tell you to. I’m telling you serious shit.” A heavy pause hangs between them, but Shiro doesn’t speak up again. When he’s sure Shiro’s given him the floor, he decides to continue on.

“I don’t care that you have baggage. I don’t care about the prosthetic. I don’t care about the scars. I don’t care about your panic attacks. I don’t care about this… complex you have about beating yourself up. I really, do not care that you have all this stuff that hangs over you, stuff that hounds you and stuff that you can’t forget.” He hugs Shiro’s arm to his chest hard as he can. Shiro can’t pull away from him. “Do you know why?”

Shiro stares down at Yuri, curled up in a tight little roll by his foot. He’s quiet for a few seconds and Lance isn’t quite sure if he’s abiding by the rule to not speak or just not listening to him.

“Why?” Shiro says softly. Lance pats the inside of his arm. 

“Because I have a great life,” He starts. Shiro’s brow furrows but Lance continues on. “I live in the most beautiful country in the world. I’m barely in my twenties and I own my own shop. I have a cute apartment. I live right on the beach and I get to do what I love with one of my best friends almost every day. That means something important.”

“It means that I don’t have to deal with a lot of shit like you do,” Lance reaches further and laces his fingers into Shiro’s, squeezes them tight. “It means that, as of right now, I’ve been dealt a better hand than you.”

“But it also means that I don’t have anything to burden me. You have too much. I have too little. You see where I’m going with this?” Shiro still doesn’t say anything, but he looks at Lance now and, after a pause, he squeezes his hand back.

“Takashi, you can give me some of it,” he says it slow, firm. Looks Shiro in the eye when he says it because he  _ means it _ . Of all the things he’s ever told Shiro, this is the most important. “Just...just hand it over. Whatever it is. Light or heavy. And I’ll hold onto it for you. I’ll keep it for you, and you won’t have to worry about it because I have it and it’s safe and I’ll never give it away,” Lance looks down at their hands and blinks hard. “You are never, ever going to hurt me, or push me away with anything you have to give.”

“Life doesn’t treat anybody the same way. She’s mean to some of us, nice to others. She doesn’t care about anyone enough to keep track of it. So we have to take care of each other.” Lance’s heart thuds in the hollow of his throat as he lifts their hands and presses his lips to the back of Shiro’s fingers. “Please. I just want to take care of you.” 

They sit there, glancing at each other. He can see the cogs working behind Shiro’s eyes. Glassy, dark gray, intelligent, gorgeous. Then something in them changes, some minute glint in his irises turning a few shades brighter. Shiro tugs their hands and brushes his lips over the back of Lance’s hand. 

“If you really want to,” Shiro says. He doesn’t pull their hands apart, instead leading them both to his lap where he can envelope Lance’s completely between both his own. “I’ll give you a little bit.” 

“All of it,” Lance presses, a little smile tugging at his lips. “As much as you can stand to give me. I wasn’t joking.” The best thing happens; Shiro gives him a little smile back. 

“I didn’t think you would want it,” Shiro says, kneading Lance’s hand gently between his own. Lance grabs whatever fingers he can get and squeezes them. “Who wants that kind of stuff?”

“Anyone who’s ever seen someone they love dealing with more than they deserve,” Lance says. Shiro looks fondly at their tangled hands. 

“You think you still love me?” he asks.

“Shiro, I don’t think anything. I know.” Lance reaches up with his spare hands and turns Shiro’s face towards him for a kiss. 


	17. Coming Together Again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, here's the last chapter of Saltwater. I did not think this would become a 50k gushing over Shance when I started it, but I'm kind of glad it did, and kind of sad to see it go.

“These boots are a little too big…” Lance says, kicking out one foot. The boots feel heavy and they’re a little hard to walk in as he thumps around the entryway while Shiro pulls on his coat. 

“You don’t really want to go out there in your sneakers, do you?” Shiro says. He offers Lance a pair of thick gloves and zips up his own coat to the collar. “It has to be knee deep out there.” He opens the door and Lance squints into the bright plain surrounding the house. It’s piled up against the door over the night and the drift sits there in a flat wall higher than Shiro’s knee. Lance creeps up beside him and peers out. Yuri squishes between them, nails clicking on the linoleum, excited but patiently waiting for Shiro to clip a long leash onto her. 

“Wanna take the first step? It’s always the best,” Shiro says. Lance sidles up to the short wall of snow and looks out. It’s almost a shame to mess it up but at the same time he has this pressing urge to do exactly that. He lifts his foot high, careful not to catch the sharp edge of the wall with the toe of his boot, and sinks it into the snow. His leg disappears up to the very edge of his boot and the cold of it seeps in slowly through the rubber. 

“Oh my god it’s a little crunchy,” Lance breathes. He takes another huge step and the flurries start sticking to his eyelashes and his clothes. He wipes a few flakes away with his gloves, then leaves them on his cheeks to try and keep himself warm. “Ugh. And cold.” Yuri takes a flying leap out into the yard, her leash trailing behind her. She sinks in up to the shoulder, snapping at flakes of snow that drift near her face. Shiro laughs and shuts the door behind him. 

“Yeah, it’s pretty cold,” Shiro says. He starts through the yard around the corner of the house but Yuri pushes headlong towards what would be the street, if they could see it. They both move with such different purposes that one would hardly think they were connected by a leash. Lance pushes on after Shiro to try and avoid letting Yuri tangle him up. He fights his way through Shiro’s footsteps across the backyard toward the shed, Yuri trailing and breaking up the snow around them. Shiro offers Lance the leash while he paws for a set of keys out of his pocket. 

“So what do you think?” Shiro asks as he unlocks the shed door and jerks on it. It doesn't move through the snow stacked against it so Shiro starts digging it out. Lance looks around. Then loops Yuri's leash over his hand and comes over to help. When he sinks his hands into the snow it creeps up his sleeves and onto his bare wrists above his gloves. In only a few seconds he swears he can feel cooler blood flowing up his arm and he isn’t sure how to react to it and his body gives a brief shudder.

“Cold,” he huffs. His nose is starting to sting and run from the chill. Shiro kicks away a bit more snow and pulls the shed door open. “Does it always snow like this?” he asks. He lingers at the door and shoves his hands in his pockets while he watches Shiro pull a small red generator out from under a workbench. He looks around but doesn't find much of interest. There's a push mower and a small box of tools, but Shiro seems to use the shed more for storage than anything else.

“Kind of,” Shiro says, he looks over the generator and seems to be content in the shape it’s in. “It snows pretty regularly but not always this much. I don't know whether or not to say you're lucky.” Yuri barks and the leash whips tight in Lance’s hand, tugging it out of his pocket. Shiro frowns. “You can let her off if you want now that we’re in the backyard. She’s good about sticking close.” Lance gives him an ‘are you sure’ look, but Shiro pulls out two shovels, a flat and a snow shovel, and hands him the snow one. 

“Need help?” Lance asks. He gives in and calls Yuri. She leaps through the snow to him, her tail swishing vigorously as he unclips her leash.

“Only if you want to,” Shiro says as Lance takes the shovel from him and stows the leash in his pocket. “It’s dangerous to have even a little generator like this in the house. There’s some concrete back here I keep the fire pit on in summer. Help me clear it off?” 

“No problem,” Lance says, following Shiro across the yard. “Is it enough for a heater at least?” Shiro moves through the snow faster than himself. He isn’t used to moving through knee high fluff. Water, yes, but this is a bit different, and he’s huffing and trying to hide the fact that his nose is running by the time Shiro scrapes the end of his shovel over concrete under the snow. 

“Yeah. One this size is enough to keep the stuff in my freezer good, run a space heater, and I’ve got a hot plate we can use for coffee and something warm for breakfast if you want,” Shiro says, flinging a shovelful of snow to the side. 

“Yes, I do want,” Lance huffs. The snow shovel is unwieldy and he has to put all his weight behind it to toss it anywhere useful. Between the two of them it doesn’t take long to clear a place out, but Lance’s is puffing, his breath billowing in the cold. He leans on his shovel and remembers just how early it is. Shiro smiles softly at him and blows into his hands. 

“You can go back inside if you need to. Now that we have this cleared off I’ll have the generator up in a few minutes.” Shiro says. Lance shakes his head. 

“I’ll let you do that, but I gotta do something I’ve always seen on tv,” Lance says. He sets down his shovel and shuffles out into the middle of yard. “I remember watching cartoons as a kid and every time it snowed someone would do this,” Lance says. He hold his arms straight out to the side and falls flat onto his back. He crunches in and the snow absorbs his weight, though it’s deep enough that he can’t see Shiro’s face when he explodes into laughter.

“You disappeared!” Shiro wheezes. His heart swells at the sound; he doesn’t think he’s ever heard Shiro laugh so loud or freely. Lance can’t help but giggle when he swings his arms and legs and the snow billows over him instead of sweeping aside neatly. 

“It’s not working!” Lance whines from what is quickly becoming a frozen cocoon. He flaps his arms around a little more then gives up. The motion entices Yuri over and Lance chuckles as she noses around his coat. 

“The snow is probably too soft,” Shiro says. He wanders over and looks down at Lance, snow sticking to his hat and coat, his cheeks pink from the cold and smiling brightly. “Do you need help?” he asks, leaning over Lance. Lance reaches up and grips the collar over his coat, tugging him down to his knees and into a quick kiss. To his delight, instead of shying away, Shiro purrs and meets him with a slip of tongue. 

“No, I think I’ll go inside and change while you do that generator stuff. Where do you keep that hot plate? I’ll find stuff for coffee.” 

Changed into fresh, dry clothes, he’s setting out a kettle and french presss, halfway through opening a gallon of water when the fridge clicks on beside him. Lance peeks out the kitchen window and if he strains, he can see Shiro moving around in the shed. Lance decides to test the hot plate and, to his delight, it comes on. Steam is starting to rise from the kettle when Shiro is changed and setting a space heater by the couch. 

“I knew there was a reason I liked you,” Lance says when Shiro flicks on the heater and he hears the fan kick in. Even though he’s hovering over the hot plate in the other room, he can already imagine the heat coming off the thing. Shiro comes into the kitchen, dressed in sweats and a thick hoodie and settles against the counter next to Lance. 

“If I had known you were so easy to please, I would have invited you up when it was warmer. We could go to the public pool.” Lance laughs and pulls out drawers until he finds the silverware. Then he hunts for sugar and coffee and tea. 

“What if you were trying to impress me? What would we do then?” Lance asks. He sets a tea bag in his mug along with a spoonful of sugar. Shiro thinks on it, his fingers digging into his bicep. Lance realizes it’s where his prosthetic meets his arm. He remembers Shiro mentioning once or twice that it gets sore when it’s too cold and half thinks about banishing Shiro to the space heater.

“Mm, Lake Erie has decent fishing. I could take you out there.” Lance thinks about sitting in a boat all day and wrinkles his nose. Shiro chuckles at his expression.

“I’m only kidding. I’ve only been fishing a couple times, but it’s pretty boring,” Shiro says. The kettle whistles and Lance takes it up, carefully pouring water into the french press and his own mug. 

“Where would you  _ really  _ take me then?” Shiro shrugs. 

“Stargazing, probably,” he says, then he seems to start backtracking on himself. “Only if you wanted to. That’s just my hobby and what I know so-” 

“I’d really like that,” Lance says because Shiro can really get started. “I always look at the sky and think it’s pretty and all, but that’s basically it. To me,  it looks like a mess. You can make sense of it.” The water in the french press is nice and dark now and Lance eases the plunger down, trapping all the grounds at the bottom. He pours Shiro a cup of coffee, but holds it hostage. “If we can, can we do that before I leave? I want you to teach me some of it.” Shiro reaches for the mug but instead of giving it over, Lance purses his lips.

“Of course we can,” Shiro sighs and gives him a soft, chaste kiss and Lance gives up the coffee. Lance takes up his tea and heads towards the living room and that nest of blankets piled on the couch. 

“Come on, let’s get you warmed up.”

Mid-morning and Lance is cuddled in on his end of the couch, dozing under a thick layer of blankets. His legs are stretched across Shiro’ lap while Shiro reads. Lance feels him shift and set the book on the arm of the couch. His other hand rests on Lance’s knees and squeezes him softly. Lance opens his eyes and finds Shiro looking concerned.

“Lance, can I tell you something?” Shiro asks. Lance wakes up fully and stretches. “Some of… some of that stuff we were talking about this morning.” 

“Yeah, of course,” Lance says. He pulls the blankets tighter around himself and sits up, crossing his legs. Shiro lets out a deep breath. 

“After that crash, it took me almost a year to even try to drive a car on my own,” Shiro looks at him out of the corner of his eye, as if he thinks Lance would think less of him for the admission. But Lance only tips his head with curiosity. He wants to hear this, this background to the way Shiro thinks, even if it’s just a hint. “For a long time I asked people to drive with me. Before I moved up here it would be either be my dad or Keith.” Shiro frowns, looks somewhat embarrassed. “I  _ could  _ drive, physically, after a while.” Shiro clutches his prosthetic with a soft mechanical whirr. “But I was so scared of something happening that I couldn’t focus.”

“What happened then?” Lance asks and scoots closer, nearly touching shoulders. 

“They gave me a new job here at the Glenn research center and I had to move. Dad and Keith both came up with me, but they had to go home eventually. I was by myself and I just had to jump into it.” Shiro says. Lance nods in understanding. He thinks about how he felt the first few nights of living on his own, even though his whole family lived just down the street. He was scared then, and he didn’t have anything to make him feel that way. With Shiro, it was different. 

“Going to Cuba last summer was supposed to be something to try and…” Shiro hums, thinking. “Get out of my shell I guess. Matt and I thought that it would be easier to try and do things I wasn’t really comfortable with if I could get out of here and some place where I didn’t know anyone.” Shiro bites the inside of his cheek and Lance rests his head on his shoulder. 

“Well, it was the first time I’d tried to fly since I crashed. I had moved by car.” Shiro’s voice goes softer. “I had a panic attack on the plane.” Lance hums softly, sets his hand on Shiro’s leg and rubs soft circles with his thumb. 

“That’s really awful.” 

“I was an hour in and I had to hide in the bathroom until I could get it under control.” Shiro’s brow furrows. Admitting this pains him; Lance can see it in his eyes. They grow dark, staring hard across the room while Lance squeezes his leg. 

“I’m sorry,” Lance says softly, simply because he doesn’t know what else to tell him. He sits up and presses a kiss to his cheek, feeling the soft hint of stubble. Shiro relaxes and leans into the touch. 

“This is kind of embarrassing, but I was fine on my flight back,” he says quietly. Lance chuckles, reaches for Shiro’s hand. “I kept thinking about you and I didn’t have time to worry about anything else.” Lance smiles, thinks about them standing together in the hotel room, neither one of them knowing if they would ever see each other again.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about you either.”

* * *

 

The next night Lance squints past the glare of Shiro’s bedside lamp through the window and up at the sky. Though the power is back on, and the snow has stopped falling and settled, the sky remains a stubborn wall of thick gray clouds with not a star slipping through. 

“I’m sorry we can’t go stargazing,” Shiro says where he rests on his bed reading. “I know you really wanted to before you left.” Lance frowns at him for bringing up the fact he has to leave late tomorrow morning. He’d been perfectly happy pretending his trip wasn’t ending so soon. 

“It’s not anything we can help,” he says. He pushes away from the window and joins Shiro on the bed, kneeling beside him. “It just means we’ll have to find an excuse to meet up again.” Shiro sets his book aside.. 

“Every day I was in Cuba this summer I really regretted that I didn’t take my telescope with me. The sky there is amazing,” Shiro says. Lance hums his agreement and, after a short thought, moves to straddle Shiro’s lap. Shiro makes a soft, curious sound, but doesn’t show any side of turning him down. Lance settles across Shiro’s thighs and grazes his fingers on the side of Shiro’s neck. 

“Then you should take some time off and come visit me again this summer,” Lance says. He leans in and Shiro meets him halfway, their lips meeting in a sensual kiss. “You can stay with me and I’ll show you around.” Another kiss and Lance presses himself against Shiro’s chest, his hand dropping from his neck to smooth down over Shiro’s sweater. “There’s a really nice place I know outside of town. Cliff overlooking the beach and everything. The stars are really pretty out there.” 

“Mn, I bet they are,” Shiro purrs. His voice lowers, takes on a soft husk that makes Lance’s blood pulse hot through his core. He hasn’t heard that out of Shiro in a good long time. Shiro’s hands trace down his sides and Lance arches into his touch when they come to rest on the small of his back. Shiro pauses then and Lance sits up enough to see the slight trouble in his eyes. 

“You’re sure you want to do this?” Shiro asks. Lance lets his head fall back dramatically and rolls his eyes. He answers first by tucking his fingers up under the front of Shiro’s shirt and tracing them over his abs. They feel nice. Shiro has always been fit and Lance very much appreciates being able to have him in the flesh again. 

“Why do you even ask that? I’m the one who climbed in your lap, aren’t I?” Lance responds. Shiro frowns, but Lance scrapes his nails lightly on Shiro’s abs until he flinches and he feels him shiver under his fingers. 

“Yeah, but we only just started this back together thing yesterday,” Lance narrows his eyes and pinches him just under his navel, hard enough that Shiro hisses. 

“Do you want this?” 

“Yes, of course but-” Lance cuts him off with a heated kiss, shoving his tongue past his lips. 

“Me too. So get out of your head and pay attention to me. I’ve been thinking about this for months.” More kisses, and Lance trails his lips up the bridge of Shiro’s nose to his forehead. “Please don’t doubt that I love you.” He sighs. 

Shiro makes this soft, almost pained sound against Lance’s collar. His fingers curl in Lance’s shirt, push it up to trace along his spine. Lance kisses him again, presses his nose in the bright shock of white hair runs his hands up his sides, feeling how his ribs expand under his touch. 

“I love you too,” Shiro says softly. He turns his head and sucks at a soft spot on the side of Lance’s neck. Lance shudders and Shiro pushes his shirt up further until it bunches up under his arms and Lance sits back to pull it off. 

Shiro’s eyes drag down the length of Lance’s body. He sets his hands on his waist, squeezes lightly while Lance tries to pull his shirt of him. “You’re beautiful,” he murmurs, tracing on hand up and circling the pad of his thumb around one of Lance’s nipples until it stiffens to a peak. 

“You too-” Lance huffs. He arches into Shiro’s touch, dips his head to catch his mouth. “Let me see.” He tugs his shirt again, catches a glimpse of his chest. “Come on, I’ve been patient.” To his delight, Shiro sits up and pulls his shirt off with little hesitation. His torso is lined with whitish scars, echoes of little nicks, long lining cuts and the speckling of punctures. Lance spreads his hands over Shiro’s collar and runs them down the length of his body. Shiro sits back and lets him, but he stiffens like he’s not used to being touched. It’s a shame. To Lance, this is just proof that Shiro’s one of the strongest people he knows.

He finds Shiro’s hands and sets them on his hips as he tracks his mouth down the side of Shiro’s neck, brushing his lips along a jagged scar on his chest. Shiro’s breath stutters over his head and he feels him grip his hips and push back, his fingers sneaking into the back of his pants. 

“Lance-” he huffs. Lance presses into Shiro’s touch, hitching when he grips him firmly. Lance slips his finger over the front of Shiro’s pants. He’s already hard and Lance can curl his fingers around him through the loose fabric of his sweats. He’d completely forgotten how big he felt in his hand. 

A shiver goes through Shiro when Lance tugs his sweats down, draws his cock free and weighs him in his hand. Shiro squeezes Lance’s ass and pulls back to hook his fingers in the waist  of his pants and tugs them down to mid-thigh. 

“You have lube in here?” Lance asks against Shiro’s collar. He draws his fingers up the ridge of his arousal and traces his thumb around the head. Shiro whines in his ear. 

“Yeah. It’s in the nightstand,” Shiro pants. Lance sits up and moves off of Shiro’s lap long enough to chuck his pants off into the floor. He pulls open the drawer and finds a small bottle of lube that he takes with him back to bed, waiting patiently for Shiro to strip before he’s back in his lap. He settles in close enough that his arousal brushes Shiro’s belly and gives him a soft kiss. He squeezes some lube in his palm and then gives it to Shiro. 

He realizes, when Shiro rubs slicked fingers over his hole, that he’s only done this once before. That one night with Shiro during the summer, on a hard hotel bedroom and just knowing that he’d never get this again. Lance breathes out and Shiro sinks the first finger into him. It feels strange, but it’s not anything uncomfortable until a second joins it. 

“Missed you,” Lance huffs into Shiro’s shoulder. He pumps Shiro’s slicked cock in his hand, aching where Shiro’s teeth dig into the meat of his shoulder and his fingers work deep in his belly. 

Three fingers and Lance starts to pant, soft and shallow. He really feels the stretch and it makes his belly flip in the best way. Shiro’s easy to read, if the way his cock twitches is anything to go by. Lance works him in both his hands and when he slips his fingers over the dripping head, Shiro makes a soft, almost desperate sound, his belly flexing tight and shivering. Shiro pays him back; he sinks his fingers into Lance up to the knuckle, flexes his wrist and rubs his prostate until Lance whines through his teeth. 

They talk, briefly, about how they want to do this, but in the end they both lose patience. Shiro slips his fingers from Lance and holds him steady as Lance shifts forward, lines them up and sinks down over Shiro’s cock. He has to take it slow; Shiro’s hot and thick and fills his belly in a way that makes his mind fuzz at the edges. Their hips meet flush and Lance wraps his arms tight around Shiro’s shoulders. 

Shiro’s the first one to move, slow and shallow. Almost like he thinks he’s going to hurt Lance. But Lance shifts to gets his knees under him and rolls his hips with him. He can feel every little twitch and thrust inside him, Shiro’s skin warm on his own, both of them clinging with nails and teeth. 

It doesn’t seem to last long enough; they’re both pent up  to a hair-trigger. He just comes down at a different angle. Shiro’s cock rubs firm over his prostate and that pushes him over the edge. He doesn’t even realize Shiro’s come with him until he hears him whimpering in pleasure, his cock pulsing hot in his belly.

* * *

 

Lance watches the teller take his suitcase and set it on the conveyor with mixed feelings. On one hand, he misses home and sunlight and the beach and temperatures he can actually survive in. On the other… He looks over his shoulder and finds Shiro lingering on the outskirts of the crowd around check in, looking over their head at him as if they’ll just swallow Lance up and he’ll lose his chance for a proper goodbye. Lance takes his boarding pass and picks up his carry-on before he pressed through to Shiro. 

“Are you nervous about flying?” Shiro asks when Lance approaches. Lance shrugs his carry-on over his shoulder in a noncommittal motion 

“A little, but not as much as when I came up. I’m ready to go home and I know what’s waiting for me,” Lance says. Hunk is probably going to fuss over him and grill him on his trip as soon as he gets off the plane. Shiro looks over his head at the crowd again and then steps in to give Lance a quick kiss.

“I don’t want to see you go,” he admits softly. Lance feels around for his hand. Unlike Shiro he has no heed of the crowd and openly laces their fingers together. 

“I don’t wanna leave you here, but I’m glad I got to come up and see you again.” He squeezes Shiro’s hand. Shiro squeezes back. “When we just talk it’s not the same. I might have some kind of withdrawal when I get home.” Shiro laughs. 

“Me too. I’ll miss you,” Shiro shakes their hands apart and pulls Lance into a hug hard enough to leave Lance wheezing. “Call me when you get home and let me know you’re alright.” Lance struggles until Shiro loosens his grip a little, then hugs him back, nuzzling into his shoulder. 

“I’m gonna call you pretty much every day until you manage to come visit me again,” Lance sighs. He feels Shiro’s fingers dig into his jacket. 

“I love you. Thank you for coming to me,” a short pause, then Shiro decides against caring about the crowd and kisses the top of Lance’s head. “I needed it.” Lance warms. 

“I love you too. I’ll always be there, okay?”

* * *

 

**JUNE**

Lance rests in a camping chair while Shiro puts together his telescope. Shiro sits beside him, hunched over a large black case filled with several telescope parts. They’re perched on a small grassy cliff overlooking the beach, white sand stretching out in a bright line on either side of them in stark contrast to the blackness of the sea at night. The air is filled with the salty scent of seaspray and the dull roar of waves lazily rolling up over the sand.

It’s dark enough that, even with the starlight around them, Lance has to keep a flashlight while Shiro fiddles with the weighty metal parts. It’s clear he knows his way around the thing front and back, each piece undergoing intense scrutiny before Shiro adds it to the greater machine. 

“You’re looking at it pretty close. Were you worried It would break while you were flying?” Lance asks. Shiro gives him a look of near disbelief. The case he has the telescope stored in is filled with tight fitting foam, the whole thing so heavy Lance doubts the telescope would be any worse for wear if he dropped it off the tallest hotel in town. 

“A little. This is one of my nicer ones, so I’m always kind of wary about moving it around too much.” He picks up the last piece, a thick lens set in a ring, and holds it up in the flashlight, squinting. “Mostly I’m just making sure all the lenses are clean.” 

“Just, how many telescopes do you have?” Lance asks. He changes the focus of the light so Shiro can see well enough to attach the barrel of the telescope to the tripod. 

“You do know where I work, right? That’s not really a fair question to ask,” Shiro says, gently testing that the connection is tight and the telescope is steady. 

“Don’t avoid me, Shiro.” Lance presses. Shiro takes the flashlight from Lance and flicks it off, sending them both into darkness.

“Five or six.” Lance wheezes softly and he can almost see Shiro bristling. “I’ve had some of them since I was a kid! This is my hobby. Mind you, I know how much yarn you hoard.” Lance pats him on the shoulder. 

“I’m sorry. You’re just cute.” Lance says. He sits back in his chair and Shiro stands and takes the telescope a few steps away, turning it in tiny increments. 

“So how much do you know out here?” Shiro asks. He turns a knob, huffs, and readjusts it. Lance points up at the sky. 

“Well, there’s the moon,” to the horizon. “The sun went that way like an hour ago. He tips his head back, squints around the scattering of stars. “And I think that’s the big dipper.” Shiro seems content with whatever he was focusing on and follows the path of Lance’s finger. 

“Yeah, that’s the big dipper. If you follow the end of the scoop, the star next to it starts the handle of the little dipper.” Lance traces a line with his finger and finds the bright point of a star. He looks around and yep, the little cluster definitely looks like a little scoop. “That bright one is Polaris. The north star.” 

“Oh!” Lance says. Shiro looks excited and Lance is sure he’d start gushing if given half a second. “What were you looking for with the telescope?” he asks. He stands and comes to join Shiro. When he motions, Lance sets his eye to the eyepiece. On the backdrop of empty space sits a bright red dot, slightly fuzzed at the edges. 

“Guess?” Shiro says. 

“Mars? It’s really red,” Lance says. He’s never taken the time to look at stars, much less try to sort out the dimmer planets scattered among them. The perfect, bright red circle gets him somehow, deep in his chest. The thought that, even enlarged so many times, Earth’s closest neighbor besides the moon only shows up as a small red dot. An entire planet nothing more than a pinprick. “For some reason I never realized it would still look so red this far away.” 

“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” When Lance steps back from the telescope, Shiro steps in again, changing the angle and focus in tiny, practiced measures. Lance turns out towards the sea and finds the long, fuzzy trail of the Milky Way. What to him looks like a vague smudge marring the perfect black and white expanse of space is actually an entire galaxy seen from an angle, from the edge of an arm of stars and cosmic dust miles and miles and miles long to the center of the galaxy. A white hot gathering around a supermassive black hole, where even the rules of the universe break down. Every star a potential home to planets. Every planet and entire world in and of itself. 

Something grips Lance’s stomach, makes it just a little hard to breathe. He’s not sure what it is. Something like fear. Something like awe. Something, he knows, means he’s just realized he’s looking at something beautiful beyond a scale he can comprehend. 

Lance looks over to Shiro when he stands up straight and looks up at the sky with him. Shiro’s been there, in some miniscule way, barely beyond the reach of Earth, but he’s been there. He’s taken a larger step than a vast majority of people and even though it’s hurt him and he’ll never be able to take that step again, Lance can see his love for the universe in his eyes. 

“Uhm, unfortunately, most of the other planets are below the horizon but-” Shiro cuts his thought short when Lance squeezes him hard around his chest. He pauses, then hugs him back. Lance pushes himself as close as he can and when he can’t go further, wills himself that much closer. On the grand scale of things, they don’t live so far apart. Lance thinks he can live with it. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who's been reading, old or new, whether you left comments and kudos or simply dropped by. I appreciate it all, because I don't think I would have ever had the motivation to finish this if no one showed any interest. 
> 
> Idk how to wrap it up otherwise. I hope you guys drop by for some of the other stuff I'm going to work on now. I've had a lot of fun writing this and sharing the shance love. 
> 
> Y'all can always find me at my tumblr and twitter so drop by and chat if you want~

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading everyone! Get a hold of me @Quiddid on twitter or quiddity25@gmail. New tumblr at quiddity25!


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